Research on climate change in urban areas is skewed towards large, well-established cities in the global north, according to analysis of more than 50,000 studies.
The research, published in Nature Cities, uses keyword searching and machine-learning methods to produce a database of studies on climate change and cities published over 1990-2022.
The authors find that small, fast-growing cities – especially in Africa and Asia – are underrepresented in their database.
“While cities like London, New York and Berlin are extensively studied, fast-growing cities such as Goma (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Surat (India) and Huế (Vietnam) are barely visible in the literature,” one study author tells Carbon Brief.
Inhabitants of these cities have collectively contributed very little to global greenhouse gas emissions, but face the greatest impacts from the warming planet, the authors say.
The paper finds that literature on climate change and cities is growing “exponentially”, with 84% of studies on this topic published over 2012-22.
The new analysis is published as scientists from around the world start work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on climate change and cities, which is due for publication in March 2027.
The study finds that, in its most recent set of headline reports, the IPCC captured “only” 5% of the total available literature on climate change and cities.
One study author tells Carbon Brief that the study is a “call to action” for the IPCC and broader research community “to synthesise more, to look beyond familiar places and to take seriously the diversity of urban realities that will define the future of climate mitigation and adaptation”.
Climate change and cities
More than half of the world’s population live in cities. These densely populated areas are responsible for the majority of global emissions and are also hotspots for climate extremes, including heatwaves and flooding.
Research about climate change and cities is a fast-growing field that encompasses, among other topics, the impacts of climate change on city infrastructure, adaptation measures that city-dwellers are taking and technological measures to limit emissions from cities.
The IPCC’s upcoming assessment report will feature its biggest overview of research on cities to date, as the organisation has commissioned a special report on climate change and cities as part of its upcoming assessment cycle. The report’s outline has already been agreed and the final document is scheduled for publication in March 2027.
However, the new study argues that, without a dedicated effort to “pre-aggregate the underlying literature by the entire research community”, the IPCC “may struggle to deliver a balanced and comprehensive review”.
The new analysis is the “first global stocktake of literature” on climate change and cities, according to a press release from the University of Sussex. The research was produced in-part to help advise the authors of the IPCC report about the current landscape of literature on climate change and cities, the study authors tell Carbon Brief.
Author Dr Tim Repke is a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He tells Carbon Brief that he hopes that the new study “can serve as a starting point of searchable, clean data” to help the authors of the upcoming IPCC special report to “do their work more efficiently”.
A growing field
The amount of literature on climate change in cities is “much larger than previously estimated”, the paper says.
Moreover, the analysis points to “rapid, exponential growth” in literature on climate change and cities over the past three decades.
The graph below shows the number of studies about climate change and cities published each year over 1990-2022 (dark blue) and the subset of studies that focus on specific city case studies (light blue).
The plot also shows how many studies were published during the writing periods of each IPCC assessment report. For example, 37,539 studies on climate change and cities were published in time to feature in the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle (AR6).
The authors find that 84% of studies in their database were published over 2012-22.
Literature on climate change and cities is currently growing 4.5 times faster than literature on climate change alone, they add.
Dr Simon Montfort is a postdoctoral researcher at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and lead author of the study. He tells Carbon Brief that the rapid growth in literature on climate change and cities is “not really surprising” because population growth in cities means that these areas are “becoming more and more important”.
The data can be explored further in their interactive online tool.
Uneven focus
There is a well-established skew in climate change literature towards wealthy nations in the global north. The new study finds that this skew is highly evident in literature on climate change and cities.
The map below shows the locations of the 20,000 “case study” papers. Darker colours indicate more highly researched areas. The map shows cities that were researched in one study (pink), between one and five studies (orange) and in more than five studies (red). The graph in the bottom left shows this information broken down by continent.
The authors identify more than 4,000 studies in Europe and 3,000 in North America. According to the authors, half of cities in these continents are covered by more than one study.
However, the map reveals a lack of research focused on cities in central and South America, Africa, the Middle East and south and south-east Asia.
The authors identify more than 8,900 studies focused on cities in Asia. One-third of these focus on Chinese cities, they find. The authors identify more than 1,500 studies on Beijing alone, most of which focus on mitigation, rather than impacts or adaptation.
Meanwhile, they find that 92% of cities in Africa are researched in no more than one study. Nigeria is the most highly studied country on the continent, with almost 400 studies – half of which focus on Lagos.
The authors identify a bias in their research database towards large cities with high emissions. Meanwhile, they find that small, fast-growing, non-coastal cities are underrepresented in the literature.
Prof Felix Creuztig is the head of the working group on cities at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He is an author on the study and on the upcoming IPCC special report.
He tells Carbon Brief:
“While cities like London, New York and Berlin are extensively studied, fast-growing cities such as Goma, Surat and Huế are barely visible in the literature. These smaller and rapidly urbanising cities in Africa and Asia are precisely where climate risks and emissions are increasing fastest, yet they are strikingly underrepresented.”
50,000 studies
To identify all existing literature on climate change and cities, the authors conducted their search using the open-access research database OpenAlex.
They first used a long list of keywords to search the abstracts of every paper on OpenAlex for research focused on cities and climate change. Keywords for literature on cities included “urban” and “built-up”, while key words for climate change ranged from “changing climate” to “carbon taxes”.
They then checked these papers using a “machine learning classifier”, which filtered out any research that was unsuitable.
The authors used a machine-learning approach to scan the abstracts of studies in their database, to determine which topics are most frequently covered.
More than half of the papers in the database were focused on mitigation, the authors found. The impacts of climate change on cities was covered in around 15,000 papers, and the rest covered adaptation and “cross-cutting” topics.
Lead author Montfort tells Carbon Brief that the database of 50,000 articles is “quite a precise sample, meaning that it includes few irrelevant articles”.
However, he adds that there may be “many relevant articles missing from our sample”. For example, the authors find that their database does not completely capture literature from the “physical sciences”, such as smart energy grids or radiative cooling methods.
Language is another notable bias, as the database only includes research published in English.
Dr Doan Quang Van is a researcher at Japan’s University of Tsukuba and a lead author on the upcoming special report. He praises the study, but notes that the English-only database likely leads to an “underappreciation of non-English regions”.
He also notes that Indigenous knowledge, which is “not necessarily contained in ‘official documents’ like papers or reports” is not included in the database.
IPCC recommendations
The authors compare the tens of thousands of studies cited by the IPCC in its most recent assessment cycle – AR6 – to their own database of literature on cities and climate change. They estimate that the IPCC cited almost 2,500 studies from the database in AR6, representing around 5% of the total.
They find that the IPCC’s choices about which studies to include further deepens the skew towards “large and mega cities” in the global north that is already evident in the literature.
Lead author Montfort tells Carbon Brief that the case studies are a “rich-evidence base” of “nuanced, case-specific knowledge”.
He says that it is important to expand the evidence base to less well-studied cities, but acknowledges it is “highly infeasible to conduct a study for every single city”. As such, he suggests that researchers should “look for ways to generalise findings from the more than 20,000 city-specific case studies already available”. He adds:
“If cities can learn from each other’s experiences, the existing evidence could go much further in informing city practitioners.”
To do this, the authors suggest that scientists should develop a data-driven method of grouping cities based on size, location and language, to enable “cross-city transfer learning from successful climate solutions”.
Dr Tamara Janes is a member of the climate information for international development team at the UK Met Office and an author on the upcoming IPCC special report. She was not involved in the new research.
She tells Carbon Brief that the study is “useful and timely”, adding that it “will undoubtedly help the ongoing special report by providing a solid foundational understanding for the current state of urban research worldwide”.
Janes adds that “this type of study is not only useful for researchers to design their research questions, but also for donor agencies as gaps in research can then be prioritised through flexible funding initiatives”.
Study author Crueztig says:
“For the IPCC and the broader research community, this is a call to action: to synthesise more, to look beyond familiar places and to take seriously the diversity of urban realities that will define the future of climate mitigation and adaptation.”
IPCC working group two co-chair, Dr Winston Chow, tells Carbon Brief that the “voluminous literature on climate change today presents challenges in its assessment”. He adds:
“Our experts are aware of these challenges towards developing reliable findings in informing our assessments and the IPCC is formally discussing this issue in a forthcoming expert workshop on methods of assessment.”
The authors add that they hope their interactive map, which is available online, will update automatically in the future to provide a “searchable, interactive, living database” of literature on climate change and cities.
The post Fast-growing, global-south cities are ‘strikingly underrepresented’ in climate research appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Fast-growing, global-south cities are ‘strikingly underrepresented’ in climate research
Climate Change
The Northern Endeavour Saga: Decommissioning, Legal Loopholes, and Toxic, Hazardous Waste
Woodside’s Toxic Legacy is still haunting the oceans
For the last 10 years Woodside and the Australian government have been embroiled in a long-running saga that led to the Northern Endeavour–a giant oil processing vessel–being shipped halfway across the planet to dismantle and deal with the toxic waste onboard.
Our colleagues at Greenpeace Denmark were particularly concerned to learn that Australia had sent this toxic waste, including mercury, asbestos and low-level radioactive material, to their shores.
Now it turns out that the Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORMs) onboard will have to be sent all the way back to Australia for disposal. It’s the latest twist in this saga, full of dodgy corporate manoeuvres, environmental risks, and bureaucratic bungles that make up the story of the Northern Endeavour.
What is the Northern Endeavour?
The Northern Endeavour is a giant 274 metre-long, 43,000 tonne-long Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel that operated off the northern coast of WA for 26 years, producing more than 200 million barrels over its lifetime. By the end of its life, the Northern Endeavour was a corroding rust-bucket, harbouring toxic and hazardous materials, slated for decommissioning.
ICYMI: decommissioning refers to the removal of offshore oil and gas infrastructure, including plugging and abandonment of the well. In layman terms, it’s what’s required of the oil and gas industry to clean up their mess, and ensure no waste is left in the environment.
How legal loopholes allowed for a dodgy sale of a degrading asset
By 2015 the Endeavour’s production was on the decline, so Woodside scaled back maintenance and let the vessel rot and degrade in the Timor Sea…until, out of the deep blue sea, they found a buyer.
Woodside took advantage of a legal loophole of that allowed them to transfer titles and sell off the Endeavour and the associated oilfield production licenses to the Northern Oil & Gas Australia Pty Ltd (NOGA)–a newly created, undercapitalised, one-person company with zero experience operating a complex offshore production facility like the Endeavour. The legal loophole enabled Woodside to bypass the regulator, who would normally rigorously scrutinize the new titleholders’ capacity to safely operate and decommission an oil rig. Woodside even paid NOGA (whose name was now TSOGA…confusing right?) USD$16.5 million (m) in cash and $5.4m in services. Nothing like a little bonus for taking a giant rust-bucket off a giant oil and gas company’s hands so they don’t have to pay to decommission it…
So what happened next? Spoiler alert: Not good!
TSOGA contracted out the operation and safety management of the Endeavour to UPS, but it was to no avail. In its first inspection of the vessel, the federal regulator, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA), found “extensive corrosion was present throughout the facility”. NOPSEMA issued 16 recommendations, with the need for a corrosion management plan being most urgent. That was on top of the 21 outstanding recommendations they had put to Woodside. Things didn’t get better from there as TSOGA failed to comply with the recommendations, and the regulator issued a series of escalatory breach notices. Then in 2019, after almost 3 years, NOPSEMA finally ordered TSOGA to cease all production on the Endeavour. In February 2020, NOGA and all its companies, including TSOGA, conveniently went bankrupt, passing the buck–the Endeavour and its decommissioning liability–to the federal government.
From ‘Lighthouse Mode’ to industry levies and regulatory overhaul
After landing Australia’s largest decommissioning liability in its history, the federal government forked out more than $200m to keep the Endeavour in ‘lighthouse mode’ while they worked out what to do–and in fact what they did was make some sweepingly positive moves.
In the face of staunch opposition and criticism, the government introduced trailing liability provisions as a backstop against another Northern Endeavour scenario, and the OP Levy, which taxes the oil and gas industry to cover the cost of the Endeavour’s decommissioning.
The upshot is for every dollar Woodside saved offloading the Endeavour, the industry is paying it back (and lots more!) to cover the cost of cleaning up their mess–tipped at $1 billion dollars. These were bold moves and a strong signal from the government that they wouldn’t be held captive by the industry’s dodgy corporate maneuvers. In response, Shell is suing Woodside for costs incurred by the levy–seems like nobody likes Woodside, not even within their own industry!
A green and golden missed opportunity
With a levy in place to recoup the cost of the clean-up from the industry, the government was presented with a golden opportunity to test-run a decommissioning pilot case. Australia has 5.7 million tonnes of offshore oil and gas infrastructure to recycle — the steel equivalent of 110 Sydney Harbour Bridges and 11 more FPSOs like the Northern Endeavour. Of this, the vast majority of the industry lies off the coast of WA, making the state ground zero for what may be the largest industrial and environmental clean-up in Australian history.
Instead, the Australian Government awarded a $35.6m contract to the Modern American Recycling Services, Europe (MARS) to dismantle the vessel, and sent it 17,000 kilometers across the world to Denmark. Freedom of Information (FOI) documents obtained by Greenpeace Denmark revealed that the Endeavour contained toxic waste when it was shipped off, and that it does not appear to have received official sign off by Australia’s Basel Competent Authority prior to departure–potentially in contravention of the international Basel Convention. Sending a corroding rust-bucket, full of flammable liquids, poisonous substances, corrosive substances, toxins, and ecotoxins to a harbour in Denmark was not the ending to the Northern Endeavour saga we were all hoping for.
Shipping the decommissioning overseas is an enormous missed opportunity across the entire value chain—with the industry valued at more than $60 billion dollars til 2060 and beyond. With more than 50% of infrastructure to be decommissioned before 2030, and nearly 75% by 2040, it’s urgent that Australia establishes a plan that will benefit the environment, economy and workers. If we get the conditions right with proper planning and coordination, it will drive investment, create thousands of jobs, support the circular economy and green steel industries and lay a foundation for clean energy pathways. That means:
- Build a WA decommissioning hub
- Enforce and strengthen existing laws to ensure full and timely decommissioning
- Invest in ports, recycling facilities, and a local workforce
- Hold operators financially responsible and mandate full industry-funded clean-up
- Introduce strict environmental monitoring
- Consult unions, First Nations, and communities to deliver a just, inclusive transition
- Link recycling to national green steel plans to position WA as a global clean energy leader
One last hurrah: the return of the NORMs!
But wait…there’s more! It turns out that any naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs) found on board the Endeavour won’t be disposed of in Denmark, and instead they’ll make the return trip back to Australia. NORMs are an expected hazard in oil and gas production processes, and given that Danish law on their disposal is very clear–namely that it rests with the operator–the federal government would have known from the outset that the NORMs would be making a round-the-world return trip back to Australia. This latest development means Australia would have to deal with the most toxic legacy of the oil and gas industry, while all the valuable material is gifted away.
Importation of radioactive material into Australia is not something we understand has happened before and questions remain as to how this complies with the Basel Convention. While there may still be more twists in the tale of the Northern Endeavour, it must serve as a wake-up call to get moving on a homegrown decommissioning industry. With the right planning, coordination and ambition, government and industry can get this right and ensure a prosperous pipeline of work for decades to come that will support the economy, provide jobs, and ensure our oceans are healthy and protected from corroding, toxic rust-buckets like the Endeavour.
The Northern Endeavour Saga: Decommissioning, Legal Loopholes, and Toxic, Hazardous Waste
A new global rainforest fund, unveiled by Brazil at COP30, will likely struggle to meet its initial funding target this year, after the UK failed to announce an expected pledge during London Climate Action Week and other donors have been slow to come on board.
The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) was launched on the sidelines of last November’s UN climate summit as an innovative mechanism to fund rainforest protection. Instead of relying on grants, it seeks to raise public and private money, invest it in financial markets, and then pay rainforest countries a share of the returns.
The facility has so far raised $6.8 billion but needs to mobilise at least $10 billion by the end of 2026, under conditions set by Norway to unlock its pledge. If the fund falls short of this goal, the Norwegian contribution of up to $3 billion in loans over 10 years will not be disbursed.
At a gathering of ministers from rainforest-rich countries at London’s Kew Botanic Gardens last Tuesday in searing heat, UK climate minister Katie White praised the TFFF and said she had held a “robust conversation in government over the last few weeks” about the importance of forests and climate action.
She had argued, she said, that “this is not a nice to have – this is absolutely vital for our security and our prosperity”. She told the small crowd of visiting ministers, officials and forest campaigners at Kew that the TFFF was an “innovative and impactful development”.
But despite climate campaigners’ hopes, the British minister did not follow Norway, Germany, France, Brazil, Indonesia and Luxembourg in pledging to the fund, whose aim is to use returns on the capital it invests in bond markets to financially reward countries who keep their tropical forests standing.
Ed Davey, UK lead for the World Resources Institute who was in the room for White’s speech, told Climate Home News afterwards that as the UK was involved in inventing the idea and the British public care about rainforests, it is “incredibly important” that the government invests in the TFFF “as soon as possible”.
“The TFFF is at a very important stage of its gestation, and if a few other critically important sovereign governments don’t come on board quite soon, there is a risk that the idea will lose momentum,” he said.
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Anders Haug Larsen, advocacy director for the Rainforest Foundation Norway, was also disappointed at the lack of a British pledge during London Climate Action Week (LCAW).
The UK government’s money and its power to mobilise private sector investment are crucial to the TFFF’s success, he said, adding that “saving tropical rainforest is a key component in solving climate change and preserving life on this planet”.
Political divisions?
British newspaper The Times later reported that White’s boss – energy and climate minister Ed Miliband – had been poised to announce a £400-million ($528m) investment pledge to the TFFF but had been opposed by UK finance minister Rachel Reeves.
According to The Times, Reeves was concerned an announcement would be unpopular, as the government was being criticised by its former defence minister for not spending enough on the military, and had pushed for the announcement to be shelved.
Climate Home News understands, however, that the UK Treasury had given the climate ministry approval to tell Brazil and Norway it would invest in the TFFF, but the administrative procedures needed to make the pledge had not been completed in time to announce a contribution during LCAW.
The UK has been cutting the amount it spends on foreign aid, including on climate projects, in order to deliver what its foreign minister called “the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War”.
Projects affected include rainforest protection schemes like the Congo Basin Forest Action Programme, which has had its budget slashed by nearly 80%.
Despite these moves to shrink overseas assistance, defence secretary John Healey resigned a few weeks ago, calling for even more spending for his department.
Last Monday, the first day of LCAW, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he would soon resign following bad local election results, with his fellow Labour parliamentarian Andy Burnham highly likely to replace him by the end of July. Reeves is looks set to be replaced as finance minister, with Miliband reportedly a leading candidate to succeed her.
Norwegian test looms
If the UK does not invest in the TFFF by the end of the year, along with other government donors, the initiative’s chances of reversing the destruction of tropical forests will be diminished, experts say.
With the US under Donald Trump unlikely to pledge and the two biggest European Union nations France and Germany already having done so, forest campaigners were hoping that the UK could fill some of the roughly $3.2 billion in new pledges needed to meet the minimum goal set by Norway.
Asked by Climate Home News if France would increase its $0.6 billion pledge, its minister for international partnerships Eleonore Caroit said last week, “I don’t have any specific information of any increase.” She added that France supports the TFFF but is also “focusing on other similar projects to achieve the same results”.
The Brazilian finance ministry has courted investments into the fund from Japan, South Korea and China. Last Friday, Brazilian finance minister Dario Durigan met Chinese finance minister Lan Fo’an and afterwards told Valor Econômico that he had raised the possibility of an investment in the TFFF.
“I think today, for the first time, China gave a stronger, firmer indication that it understands the TFFF model and is comfortable with it,” Durigan was quoted as saying. “There has been a positive signal,” he added. “Now we will work with his team to turn that into concrete commitments.”
Larsen of the Rainforest Foundation Norway said there is also hope that Middle Eastern countries, more European nations and the European Union could contribute. The UAE has expressed interest in the fund, and has provided technical assistance for its development.
Following a recent investor retreat in Rotterdam attended by government officials and private investors, a group of 12 financial institutions – including UK-based Ashmore Group and Dutch firm Robeco – endorsed the fund as an “opportunity to support the protection of up to a billion hectares of tropical forests”.
They added that the fund’s seed capital from governments is “building momentum” and that the TFFF has put in place a “robust institutional governance” that can deliver results in the long term.
Economic value for standing forests
Details of how the TFFF will work are being finalised in an attempt to encourage investment.
Earlier this month, it was announced that its investment arm (the Tropical Forest Investment Fund – TFIF) would be based in Luxembourg. The European financial hub said it will provide €50 million ($57m) to the TFIF through its Climate and Energy Fund between 2026 and 2030, after which it will “maintain a long-term annual contribution”.
The Norwegian government has tasked a veteran of its sovereign wealth fund, Knut N. Kjaer, with reviewing the TFFF’s financial model.
At Kew Gardens last week, the head of the Brazilian forest service Garo Batmanian said the TFFF and other measures are needed so that standing forests are economically valued and therefore protected.
“There is no chainsaw-wielding maniac out there cutting down trees out of pleasure,” he said. “He’s cutting down trees because he thinks he can get more money using the land for something else, so it’s not only about stopping deforestation but also promoting that the standing forest has value.”
The post Tropical forest protection fund at risk after UK stalls on pledge appeared first on Climate Home News.
Tropical forest protection fund at risk after UK stalls on pledge
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) will have nearly $6 billion more to spend on emissions-reduction and climate adaptation projects in developing countries, after its board agreed to a management proposal to reduce the proportion of money it has to keep in reserve.
At a meeting in Tajikistan this week, the government representatives who make up the fund’s board endorsed the proposal to revise its financial rules so that it no longer has to set aside one dollar for every dollar it spends.
Instead, the buffer amount will be decided based on a new, looser methodology. The GCF’s chief financial officer, Darren Tan, told board members that the old rules had led to too much cash building up in the fund’s reserves and “constrained the resources that we could deploy”.
The fund has a portfolio of 360 projects to which it has allocated $20.5 billion, but it has struggled to collect all the pledges made by donors as the US has failed to deliver billions and other wealthy nations are now making cuts to their funding for climate work in developing countries.
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The new system has been independently validated and is supported by the GCF’s trustee, the World Bank. Tan said the approach is still prudent enough that the fund will remain “financially resilient even under adverse conditions”.
The change “allows the fund to do more with the same resources”, Tan concluded, adding that “this translates directly into greater climate impact”. The shift leaves the fund with $5.65 billion to put into projects instead of around $1 billion under the previous rules.
The reforms follow wider moves to get funders of climate action to do more with their money. In 2023 and 2024, the World Bank lowered its equity-to-loans ratio from 20% to 19% and then 18%, freeing up around $7 billion a year for it to invest.
At their meeting in Dushanbe, GCF board members broadly welcomed the proposal, although several complained they had not been given enough time to consider reforms of such importance.
“No brainer”
While developed countries were all supportive, developing nations’ responses were more mixed. Some called for the new system to be implemented immediately but others urged a slower roll-out and raised concerns that the changes would lead the fund to give out more loans and fewer grants.
Canada’s representative said the approach is “considered standard practice across the climate finance architecture”, the UK said it “seems sensible”, France called it a “no-brainer” and New Zealand said it would “grow the funding pie”.
Germany’s Annette Windmeisser said it “responds to the COP29 decision to triple outflows from the mutilateral climate funds”. This goal was agreed after a push from small island and least developed countries but – with funding from wealthy governments faltering – the GCF is looking at controversial options like borrowing from banks to meet it.
Japan’s Kazuho Taguchi hinted at similar motivations for supporting these reforms. “Efficient use of limited public resources” is essential, he said, because “it is unrealistic to expect public finance from developed countries alone to meet the full scale of need”.
Fears grants replace loans
Some developing countries strongly supported the reforms too, including Gambia representing the least developed nations, Costa Rica and Uruguay.
Others urged caution. Georgia’s Nino Tandilashvili said the “outside world… want more projects from us” but also “financial sustainability of this fund”.
Botswana’s Balisi Gopolang echoed this and Ghana’s Antwi Boasiako-Amoah said the fund’s models should be tested against performance and the changes should be implemented slowly and piloted first.
Boasiako-Amoah also said he was concerned that the new methodology would be used to increase the proportion of the fund’s money that is loaned out to developing countries rather than distributed as grants. As the money is intended to be returned, loans are less financially risky to the GCF than grants.
The board’s decision approving the reform incorporated this concern by noting that the “risk appetite or financial instrument mix” of board spending decisions should not be influenced by the new policy.
Liane Schalatek, who monitored the meeting for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, told Climate Home News that the reforms give the GCF “some breathing room” for the next year or two, after the Trump administration reneged on US pledges and the UK halved the contribution it had promised for 2024-2027.
But, Schalatek added, “it does not solve the fundamental question of whether developed countries are willing to stick to their obligations under the Paris Agreement and the [UN climate regime] that still requires them to provide substantial inputs into the GCF for the next replenishment period from 2028-2031.”
The post Billions unlocked as Green Climate Fund agrees to spend more and save less appeared first on Climate Home News.
Billions unlocked as Green Climate Fund agrees to spend more and save less
The Northern Endeavour Saga: Decommissioning, Legal Loopholes, and Toxic, Hazardous Waste
Tropical forest protection fund at risk after UK stalls on pledge
Billions unlocked as Green Climate Fund agrees to spend more and save less
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