BARCELONA: An international commitment to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to help vulnerable countries tackle climate change is unlikely to be met if only government funding from rich nations is counted towards it, researchers said.

At UN climate negotiations, some developing countries have argued the annual $100bn should come entirely from developed nations’ treasuries, even though the original promise called for funding from a range of sources.

Climate finance from wealthy states’ coffers alone would not hit the target unless it grew at 25 per cent each year from 2012, the World Resources Institute (WRI) said in a paper. “It’s not an impossibility if there is enough ambition but there’s nothing in the recent past that would indicate we could grow at those rates,” said WRI finance expert Michael Westphal, lead author of the paper outlining scenarios to get to $100bn.

The researchers suggested a combination of climate finance sources could be counted towards the goal, including support from multilateral development banks, private-sector investment mobilised by public money, and development aid relating to climate change.

If that were to happen, climate finance could total $109bn to $155bn in 2020 under projections of low to medium increases across all the sources, the paper said.

Westphal said progress should be made this year on defining how to reach the annual $100bn, ideally with a formal decision at December’s UN conference in Paris, where leaders are due to agree a new global deal to tackle climate change.

When the non-binding climate finance commitment was made in Copenhagen in 2009, the accord said the $100bn would come from “a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance”.

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2015

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