Why does the world's biggest climate fund want India, China to step up?

By Antony Sguazzin 

A green fund backed by the United Nations is urging India and China to step up after US President Donald Trump rescinded $4 billion from the world’s biggest climate asset manager. 

Trump has upended humanitarian aid, development and climate finance sectors by halting funding. The US leader has also exited the Paris Agreement climate treaty and the World Health Organization.

 

“It leaves the agenda in a very difficult situation,” Mafalda Duarte, the head of the Green Climate Fund, said in an interview on Feb. 28 in Cape Town. “It leaves us with the need for others to take leadership positions.”

 

China and India, as the world’s biggest and third-largest greenhouse gas emitters and major economies, should step up their involvement she said, calling for a “coalition of the ambitious.” The US is the world’s second-biggest emitter and historically the biggest source of carbon stored in the atmosphere.

 

The Trump administration’s disdain for climate finance and renewable energy threatens to set back the global drive to slow planetary warming at a time when its already behind schedule.

 

“The US plays a really pivotal role be it in climate, be it in other agendas because it’s the world’s largest economy. It has convening, it has influencing power,” Duarte said on the sidelines of a global meeting of development finance institutions. “They play a really important role in terms of leading and driving others to act in a certain way.”

 

Obama, Biden 

The withdrawal of the funding is the portion of the $6 billion pledged by the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden that’s yet to be paid. 

 

The move is the first time funding has been rescinded for the Incheon, South Korea-based institution, which was formed by the United Nations in 2010. It has $17 billion in investments with a further $3 billion planned this year. European countries collectively have provided the bulk of funding, she said. 

 

It’s unclear what impact the funding withdrawal will have on the plans by the GCF, which invests in a range of sectors including climate resilient infrastructure and water-reuse programmes. This year’s planned deployment of $3 billion will be a record and by 2030 the fund aims to have invested $50 billion, Duarte said. 

 

“We have many more projects than the capital we can deploy,” she said, adding that future funding could come from levies on heavily emitting sectors such as aviation as well as carbon taxes.