Climate pact hinges on finance: conference host France

Forging a global climate pact hinges on rich nations making firm financial commitments, French President Francois Hollande said today, warning of "risks of failure" for a year-end Paris conference.
"There will be no agreement... If there is no firm commitment on finance" for developing nations, he said as ministers and diplomats from 57 countries met elsewhere in the French capital to discuss exactly this issue.
The November 30-December 11 UN conference is tasked with sealing a universal deal to roll back the threat of climate change.
But without an accord on finance, "countries will refuse, emerging economies... And they are right," the president told journalists.

Finance is a major stumbling block in the fraught, years-long UN effort to conclude a pact committing all the world's nations to curbing climate-altering greenhouse gases.
The overarching goal is to limit average global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels -- the threshold at which scientists say we can still avoid worst-case-scenario climate effects.

Hollande addressed a press conference as foreign and environment ministers and senior officials concluded two days of talks on the finance question.
Funding is the key to help developing countries shift to greener energy, adapt to a climate-altered world and deal with the loss and damages they will suffer from rising seas, droughts, storms and other impacts.

Poor and developing nations, among the most threatened by global warming, are insisting rich counterparts show how they intend to meet a promise made in 2009 of USD 100 billion (90 billion euros) in climate finance annually from 2020.
At the end of the informal ministerial meeting, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius insisted the USD 100 billion commitment "must be respected."
In a bid to "give credibility to the process," he said, France and Peru, which hosted last year's climate conference, had asked the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a coordinating forum on economic matters, to provide clarity on how the figure will be fleshed out.

"It will tell us what is being done on climate by governments... By multilateral banks, by the private sector," the minister said.
"This will naturally allow us to determine a trend, to see whether we are on track vis-a-vis the target of $100 billion in 2020, or if there are additional efforts to be made."
The ministerial talks were not part of official negotiations for the highly-anticipated agreement, but are meant to inject momentum into the troubled UN process.