24 September 2009
The Prime Minister has told the United Nations that $30 billion will be needed to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change.
Speaking in New York, Gordon Brown said international public finance should meet a significant proportion of this, focusing on the poorest and most vulnerable countries.
Mr Brown was among world leaders attending a climate change summit called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ahead of December’s conference in Copenhagen.
The Prime Minister said: “Climate change is a terrible injustice. It has been caused almost entirely by the richest countries, but its earliest and most damaging effects will fall - and are already falling - on the poorest.”
The UK is also calling on developed countries to ensure that climate funding for poor countries includes finance over and above existing aid commitments.
The UK government is committed to helping poor communities withstand the effects of climate change. DFID is already funding adaptation projects, such as those in Bangladesh, and we have committed £800 million to the Climate Investment Funds, including £225 million for adaptation over the next three years.
Regardless of efforts to cut global emissions, the world is now locked into some global warming due to past emissions. This is causing impacts such as flood, drought and sea level rise which are hitting poor countries the hardest. That is why it’s important that developing countries are able to adapt to the impacts, for example by:
To make this possible, governments need to agree funding for adaptation as part of a global climate change deal, due to be agreed in Copenhagen this December.
There have been various estimates of the cost of tackling adaptation to climate change in developing countries.
The UNFCCC has put the figure at $28-$67 billion per year by 2030. The European Commission recently suggested a sum, derived from the UNFCCC figures, of $15-35 billion (€10-24 billion) per year by 2020. And Project Catalyst (a philanthropically funded project to develop analysis for the UNFCCC) has put the cost of adaptation at $15-30 billion (€10-20 billion) per year on average from 2010 to 2020.
Evidence from emerging studies suggests that the figure will be at the upper end of the 2020 figures.
The UK government is proposing to push for an agreement on international institutions in Copenhagen that will put in place a new ‘compact approach’. This would:
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Adapting to climate change in Bangladesh: rearing ducks, which are able to swim in times of flood. Photo credit: DFID/Rafiqur Rahman Raqu