There are still new ideas under the sun – If you know where to look…

13 February 2015

Dear delegates, after an [exhausting][exhilarating] week here in Bonn some of you might be feeling tapped out of new [ideas][text]. But ECO is here to assure you that there are some new-old and new-new ideas still out there to be taken advantage of in finance.

The UNEP Adaptation Gap report gave the full rationale for exploring these ideas. It is clear that [new] [innovative] [alternative] sources of finance offer significant potential to raise new, additional and predictable finance for adaptation and loss and damage. In fact, we could raise between USD 26 and 115 billion by 2020 from just 3 of these sources:

  • A Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) in the EU has been given a new lease on life by President Hollande, with his plan to host a meeting of 11 interested Eurozone nations this year. The opportunity is there to commit FTT revenues to the GCF.
  • A clear signal from the Paris agreement that international transport emissions must be addressed by international aviation and maritime bodies ICAO and IMO.  This could unlock new finance, whilst helping diminish a projected BAU emissions growth of up to 270% in this sector by 2050.
  • Despite 87% of auction revenues from the EU ETS going to climate finance, less than 20% of this, from just five countries, has gone to international climate finance,. This offers an opportunity to change the rules so that all allowances are auctioned, increasing total funds and committing participating countries to providing revenue to international finance.
  • The idea of a Fossil Fuel Extraction Levy, to be paid into the Loss and Damage Mechanism, offers the opportunity to raise substantial new and predictable finance from the fossil fuel industry, rather than treasury coffers, to pay for loss and damage.
  • Finally, there is the matter of the millions that could be freed from the largely dormant funds in the UNFCCC’s Sustainable Development Mechanism unit, as well as the CDM scale-up fund, and redirected either to the Adaptation Fund or towards capacity building.

Thanks to a group of forward-thinking Parties, we have the option to explore these new sources of finance in the text. We need Paris to agree to kick this effort off immediately in 2016, with a view to identifying and mobilising these alternative sources of finance by 2020, or 2025 for the sources that will take longer to come to fruition.

There are still new ideas under the sun – If you know where to look…

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