Fifteen years ago, wealthy nations pledged to channel US$100 billion in climate aid to poorer countries by 2020. New analyses find that not only were rich nations two years late in meeting this goal, but much of the money was existing aid that had been relabelled as climate assistance, or it took the form of loans.
A new accounting from the OECD finds that wealthy nations first reached their goal in 2022, delivering nearly $116 billion in climate aid.
OECD chief Mathias Cormann said that surpassing the US$100 billion mark was “an important and symbolic achievement which goes some way towards making up for the two-year delay, which should help build trust.”
But a new analysis from the Centre for Global Development suggests that US$27 billion of the 2022 total was existing assistance that had been relabelled or repurposed as climate aid. This is despite the expectation that wealthy nations provide aid that is “new and additional”.
Moreover, most of the aid in 2022 took the form of loans, which have historically channelled billions of dollars back to wealthy nations, according to a recent analysis from Reuters.
From 2015 to 2020, wealthy nations issued US$18 billion in climate loans at market-rate interest. They also supplied another US$11 billion in loans that required poorer countries to buy from companies in lender nations.
“From a justice perspective, that’s just deeply reprehensible,” Liane Schalatek, of the Heinrich-Boll Foundation, told Reuters. — E360 DIGEST
