Behind the smokescreen around private climate finance
The HinduOver the last few years, developed countries have insisted upon two points on the issue of climate finance. The OECD 2020 data, however, shows that the mobilisation of private climate finance has underperformed against the expectations of developed countries falling short by 60 percentage points, $13.1 billion in 2020 against $33 billion in the road map. Further, although many developed countries and multilateral development banks have emphasised the importance of private finance mobilised in their climate finance strategies, including by de-risking and creating enabling environments, “these efforts have not yielded results at the scale required to tap into the significant potential for investments by the private sector and deliver on developed countries climate ambition”. This implies that the composition of public climate finance portfolios will progressively change towards a larger share of activities with low to no private finance mobilisation potential; this includes finance for adaptation, and capacity building, as grants, for least developed and small island developing countries. Therefore, addressing the urgent climate finance needs of developing countries cannot be left to the mercy of false promises of trillions of U.S. dollars in mobilised private climate finance.