ENVIRONMENT CHIEF JOINS GREEN FUND MEETING IN GENEVA Tuesday 13th September 2011
Chief Environment Officer Diann Black-Layne is among negotiators meeting in Geneva this week for the development of a strategy which will serve as a guideline to source billions of dollars slated to flow through a new United Nation climate change fund.
The Geneva meeting, which runs September. 11 to 13 th, is the third one aimed at designing the Green Climate Fund. Negotiators are expected to finalize their recommendations in time for the year's final U.N. climate conference in Durban, South Africa, this December.
According to Black-Layne, the meeting of the transitional committee to the Green Climate Fund focus on the role that the private sector is expected to play in raising dollars. That issue, however has been particularly controversial, with many developing countries insisting that industrialized countries contribute to the fund from public coffers.
The United States, Europe, Japan and other developed economies, meanwhile, maintain that the vast majority of the money to help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change and develop clean energy systems will likely come from private sources.
In a statement issued Monday, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres said, "Nothing short of transformational change is required in order to enable the world to shift towards a low-carbon, climate-resilient future. This cannot happen without an effective way of using public funds to leverage much higher levels of private capital."
Figueres, to this end has not weighed in on the respective private versus public dollars share size of Green Climate fund, but would only say, “a healthy combination is critical.”
Climate negotiators from the United States and 192 other countries agreed last year to develop the Green Climate Fund. They also solidified an earlier agreement to raise $100 billion annually to be used for climate adaptation and clean energy development.
But there remains widespread disagreement about how closely the $100 billion and the Green Climate Fund should be linked, with the United States working hard to distance the two and some developing countries insisting that the vast majority of that money flow through the fund.
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