Climate Finance Reporting QUIZ

6 December 2019

Climate Finance Reporting QUIZ

Think you know all about climate finance? Think you understand what’s at stake in new rules for reporting?  Take ECO’s TRUE or FALSE quiz to find out€¦

Close to 60% of all climate finance in 2017 was in the form of loans -> TRUE

And not only that, loans which amounted to US$39.9 billion in 2017, were mostly counted at full face value, ignoring interest and repayments. New common reporting tables in the Common Tabular Format  (CTF) must mark a break from this practice of over-reporting by including a column for the grant equivalent of climate finance alongside its face value.

Only genuine climate action is reported as climate finance -> FALSE

Current rules allow for gross over-estimation of the climate relevance of funds, especially where climate change is one part of a broader project with multiple objectives. At the worst end of the spectrum, some countries (including Japan, Iceland and Greece) are counting the climate component of these projects at 100% of the project budget. New CTF tables must guard against this by including a “climate specific” column, a “full project value” column, and a requirement that parties set out their methodology for calculating these separate amounts.

All parties agree the Common Tabular Format should be common -> FALSE

ECO is scratching its head as to why some are proposing parties be allowed to delete columns and amend tables to suit their own reporting preferences. ECO disagrees this should be allowed €” the clue is in the name, Common Tabular Format. 

Lending at a profit can currently be reported as climate finance -> TRUE

For real. A third of all bilateral climate finance loans were non-concessional, as were 70% of multilateral climate finance loans in 2016-17. There is currently nothing to stop market rate loans and no requirement to report the terms of loans provided. 

Public finance can be used to support private profit in the name of climate finance  -> TRUE

Private investments in what will be or already are profitable sectors such as renewable energy or water management may be portrayed as “mobilised support” in the CTF. At COP24, in Katowice, it was agreed that developed countries would “identify a clear causal link between a public intervention and mobilized private finance”, but are we going to be able to verify that project by project on the basis of numbers in an Excel sheet?

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