MRV of Finance: What Could Be So Hard About That?

3 December 2012

ECO understands that progress on transparent reporting of climate finance is grinding to a halt. SBSTA was meant to adopt common tabular formats for reporting by developed countries of both emissions and climate finance. Now the process appears to be deadlocked with no immediate solutions in sight.

Apparently, developed countries are opposing a key proposal made by developing countries on transparent reporting – a common tabular format on climate change. Essentially, this is a method to provide listings of individual, bilaterally financed actions, rather than just aggregate figures per recipient country or per sector. 

The idea to list every single financed action with information on title, recipient country, committed amount, climate component of amount, sector, mitigation/adaptation, grants / / loans (also stating grant equivalent) and so forth seems pretty reasonable to ECO. Transparency of one's own actions is a key ingredient to a 'circle of confidence' and a precondition for the ‘V’ in MRV. Developed countries could use such lists to demonstrate transparency, as well as tracking where and how their climate finance is flowing. 

However, developed countries continue to argue that submitting project listings is too cumbersome. ECO would like toremind everyone that developed countries are already compiling such lists – forexample, the OECD DAC reporting system currently used to report aid flows. So the idea of such listings is neither new nor prohibitively cumbersome.

If developed countries continue to resist providing listings of financed actions as part of their MRV exercise, ECO is always eager to serve.  For example, ECO could use the ‘freedom of information’ laws that exist in many countries to locate theinformation and submit it to the UNFCCC, as a courtesy to transparency and the ‘V’ in MRV.