G20 fails to reach agreement on climate change financing
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The G20 policymakers urged to push forward climate change financing but failed to reach an agreement on how to fund policies to tackle climate change at the two-day G20 Finance Minister and Central Bank Governor Meeting (the Meeting) that ended in St Andrews on Saturday afternoon.
They have committed to work for an "ambitious outcome" at the upcoming Copenhagen climate change conference, but they could not agree on how to fund poor countries to deal with climate change.
"We committed to take action to tackle the threat of climate change and work towards an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen, within the objective, provisions and principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)," said the communique released after the meeting was ended.
At the meeting, they discussed a range of options and, recognizing that finance will play an important role in the delivery of the outcome at Copenhagen. "We commit to take forward further work on climate change finance, to define financing options and institutional arrangements," according to the communique.
They recognised the need to increase significantly and urgently the scale and predictability of finance to implement an ambitious international agreement. Public finance can leverage significant private investment.
However, they had different views on climate change financing at the meeting. So they could not work out any substantial plans to push forward the process of climate change financing.
At the meeting, UK Chancellor Alistair Darling said "if there isn't an agreement on finance, if there isn't an agreement about contributions to make sure we can deal with this problem, then the Copenhagen agreement is going to be much, much more difficult."
The Barcelona UN climate change talks, which ended on November 6, made little progress in the issue of climate change financing. Thus, experts are worried that the road to Copenhagen would be long and full of uncertainties.
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