Environment

Least Developed Countries demand clear financial Support from rich nations by end of year if they want the decisions that would be taken at the forthcoming climate change conference to be successfully implemented

|  By Maureen Chigbo  |  Jul. 1, 2013 @ 01:00 GMT

THE key factor to a successful implementation of the decisions to be reached at the forthcoming Climate Change Conference, scheduled to hold later in the year in Warsaw, is financial support to the least developed countries, LDC.  The world’s least developed countries which met in Bonn, Germany, June 14, called upon the industrialised nations to provide detailed information about the finance they are willing to provide to help the vulnerable adapt to climate change.

Prakash Mathema, the chair of the Least Developed Countries, said at the end of international negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, Group, that greater financial transparency was needed to implement action to tackle climate change. The LDC Group wants each industrialised country to provide information on the levels of finance it has provided in 2013 and how much it will provide in future years. The group demands that the information should include precise allocations for adaptation specifically, along with a breakdown of how much finance is for the LDCs. The LDCs also request that the richer nations should provide this information at the 19^th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC, COP19.

According to Mathema, “The LDC Group expresses its deepest appreciation to the Annex 1 Parties who have made substantial contributions towards supporting adaptation in the LDCs.  But there is too much uncertainty about where the future funds will come from.” He is of the view that delayed climate action and lack of ambition to close the mitigation gap will cost more tomorrow than today. “We need to move to a sustainable climate smart pathway where life is possible for all and for generations to come. The LDCs, with their weak adaptive capacity and their extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change, have already witnessed many catastrophic climate disasters and these events are going to be more frequent, intense and unpredictable.,” he said.

“We are all aware of the fact that the level of concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million, the highest level for some three million years. This is alarming. We lament the failure of parties to launch the negotiations under the UNFCCC’s Subsidiary Body for Implementation at the UN negotiations which ended recently in Bonn. This is of grave concern to us as issues of implementation are key for the LDCs. We expect this not to happen again at COP19 in Warsaw later this year,” Mathema said.

He added: “Communities around the world have high expectations regarding this process and hope that we, as climate ambassadors, will take some bold decisions very soon to protect humanity from the adverse impacts of climate change. To implement such decisions, financial support is key. We need to act now and we need to act together.”

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