Fund us to fight climate change, BASIC nations urge richer countries

BASIC officials claim green climate corpus only has $7 million against $30 million committed by developed nations

The BASIC Group Meeting, formed by Brazil, South Africa, India and China, has reiterated the need for a roadmap to raise funds for green climate and urged the developed countries to contribute their share to the funding of $30 billion that they have already agreed.

The fund should have a corpus of around $30 billion, and the developed countries have already committed to provide the fund combined as fast-start funding for the project. However the fund currently has only around $7 billion, said the officials after the Group meeting, concluded today in Chennai.

Speaking to the reporters after the meeting of BASIC Environment Ministers on Climate Change, Jayanthi Natarajan, Union Minister for State (Independent Charge) for the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, said, "The meeting stressed that there should be clear roadmap to raise finance (short- and long-term). The capitalisation of fund is important."

The meeting also looked at how the fund could be raised to finance the project, which could be from public and private resources, though a majority of it should come from public fund.

The Group also urged the developed countries to increase their level of mitigation ambition, noting that currently the level is not adequate to achieve major results. It may be noted that while the Durban outcome under the Kyoto Protocol has set goal to bring down emissions in developed countries by 25-40 per cent below the emission levels of 1990, which has to be achieved by the year 2020, the current commitments for reduction of emission are not up to the required mark.

While the Durban outcome under the Kyoto Protocol notes the goal for reducing emissions in developed countries by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020,2 unfortunately Parties’ current emissions reduction commitments fall very short of this range. Durban decisions have “urged” an increase in ambition on the part of developed countries.

The ministry has earlier announced that the important issues that would be discussed in the BASIC Ministers meeting include principles under the Durban Platform, the role and relevance of independent international initiatives including sectoral actions in promotion and achievement of global ambition, and the steps needed to ensure means of implementation to parties for enhancing their efforts.

Various international groups of nations, like the G77 could togather urge the developed nations to bring down their emissions, said Natarajan.

Funding is very important to achieve the goals set for the project and the nations has to look at various options of funding, said Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman, National Development and Reform Commission, China.

The plans are to collect fund from various sources and channel it through the Green Climate Fund, said Alfred Wills, chief negotiator, Department of Environmental Affairs, South Africa.

The deliberations in the 14th BASIC meeting held for two days, February 15 and 16 in Chennai, is also expected to help India and other BASIC countries in formulating their approach to future issues in the negotiations and plan help build ambitious and equitable architecture for post 2020 arrangements. India, along with the like-minded developing countries, are also expected to meet in Geneva on 27-28 February, 2013 to review the decisions at Doha and plan the future steps.