A year after its inaugural meeting, the Board of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) left its fifth meeting in Paris earlier this month with a collective sense of urgency. The GCF is expected to become the main vehicle for disbursing climate finance to developing nations, so the decisions made at this most recent meeting significantly impact the future of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Encouragingly, Board members stepped up to the important task before them, making progress across several key issues. Their decisions made it clear: The GCF’s inception phase (referred to officially as "the interim period") is over—the focus now is on funding it and launching its operations.
Asia
This post was written by Lord Nicholas Stern, president of the British Academy, and Felipe Calderón, former president of Mexico and a WRI Board member. It originally appeared on Project Syndicate.
This Friday, in its latest comprehensive assessment of the evidence on global warming, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will show that the world’s climate scientists are more certain than ever that human activity – largely combustion of fossil fuels – is causing temperatures and sea levels to rise.
In recent years, a series of extreme weather events – including Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, floods in China, and droughts in the American Midwest, Russia, and many developing countries – have caused immense damage. Last week, Mexico experienced simultaneous hurricanes in the Pacific and in the Gulf of Mexico that devastated towns and cities in their path. Climate change will be a major driver of such events, and we risk much worse.
This puts a new debate center stage: how to reconcile increased action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with strong economic growth.
When the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, takes the floor of the UN general assembly this week, he will address two of the most pressing challenges of our time: poverty and climate change.
Photo Credit: Sukree Sukplang
Fair Energy in Thailand
Electricity production accounts for 40% of global CO2 emissions. Too often, electricity decisions are made through closed processes with little scrutiny. WRI’s Electricity Governance Initiative is a civil society partnership working in India, Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, and the Philippines – five countries with rapidly growing emissions from power generation – to improve public participation in the energy decisions that affect their lives.
The Electricity Governance Initiative has played an important role in the development of Thailand’s new Energy Industry Act, provisions of which include: promoting adequate energy services while maintaining fairness for both consumers and businesses; protecting consumer interests with regard to tariffs and service quality while increasing competition and preventing abuses of power; and promoting fairness and transparency in the provision of energy without unjust discrimination.
When President Barack Obama announced the country’s first national climate strategy, many people wondered what it would mean across the nation. Yet, the strategy may carry even more significant implications overseas.
The plan restricts U.S. government funding for most international coal projects. This policy could significantly affect energy producers and public and private investors around the globe.
Last month, Death Valley, California experienced the highest June temperature ever recorded (129 degrees F!). Fires have been blazing in the western United States, leading to catastrophic losses of life. We’re barely more than a month into summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and it has started off extreme.
Asian Development Bank Supports Sustainable Enterprises
The Asian Development Bank was established in 1966 to help its forty eight developing member countries reduce poverty and improve the quality of life of their citizens. In 2009, the Bank launched a new program of technical assistance to encourage the growth of small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) in India and Indonesia that provide environmental and social benefits.
Ella Delio works in WRI’s New Ventures project, which promotes business solutions that align the need for sound financial returns with environmental and social goals. She and her team were the Bank’s primary advisors in developing the new program. “SMEs,” Delio explains, “are the engines of equitable economic growth in emerging market nations. Accounting for an average of 34% of the GDP and employing in excess of 60% of the labor force, SMEs are great sources of innovation and often provide strong linkages to poor communities. They have the capacity to transform the economic development paradigm by delivering business models that are pro-poor and pro-environment.”
Asian Development Bank Embraces Sustainable Energy
With a lending portfolio of $10.5 billion in 2008, the Asian Development Bank wields significant influence over the economic development policies of countries in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region.
In 2009, the Bank adopted a new energy policy geared toward supporting clean energy and low-carbon economic growth. Key commitments included: requiring carbon footprinting of proposed projects, technical support for countries to undertake low carbon strategies, and tools to help countries determine more efficient energy options. The Bank backed it up by committing to provide $2 billion annually to clean energy projects starting in 2013. This would represent a doubling of such investments based on 2008 lending.
“Taken together, these initiatives provide some of the strongest commitments yet by an international financial institution to clean energy investment,” explains Isabel Munilla, whose work at WRI focuses on aligning public and private investment with sustainable development and poverty reduction. “It sends a strong signal to other multilateral and regional development banks that they can play a catalytic role in helping developing countries deploy cleaner, safer, renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.” WRI and its partners in the region played a pivotal role in helping Bank officials develop the new policy.
Following record-breaking air pollution across Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, ministers from five Southeast Asian countries will meet in Kuala Lumpur this week for urgent talks on combating the haze.
New analysis of the patterns and causes of the fires in Sumatra that caused the haze highlights serious issues at the kickoff of this 15th meeting of the Sub-Regional Ministerial Steering Committee on Transboundary Haze Pollution.
The new analysis from the World Resources Institute (WRI), which has been closely monitoring the fires since they began, highlights four key challenges that should help set the agenda for the Ministers of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam and Thailand.
1. First, pulpwood and oil palm concessions have a more significant role in the fires that we earlier thought.
WRI’s analysis shows that that the number of fire alerts per hectare, in other words their density, is three to four times higher within pulpwood and oil palm concession boundaries than outside those boundaries.
A social entrepreneur invests the little working capital she has to bring solar electricity to a community that –like 1.2 billion people worldwide– lacks access to electricity. The community used to use dirty, expensive and choking kerosene for light to cook by and for children to learn by. The entrepreneur knows she can recoup her costs, because people are willing to pay for reliable, high-quality, clean energy – and it will be even less than what they used to pay for kerosene. Sounds like a good news story, right?
Three months later, the government utility extends the electrical grid to this same community, despite official plans showing it would take at least another four years. While this could be good news for the community, one unintended consequence is that this undermines the entrepreneur’s investment, wiping out their working capital, and deterring investors from supporting decentralized clean energy projects in other communities that lack access to electricity.