| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2009 
'Green Fund' Getting Rave Reviews Abroad
 Alex Morales - Bloomberg News
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President Felipe Calderón's proposal for a global warming fund that rich and poor countries both pay into is gaining support as negotiators enter the last six months of U.N. climate talks leading to an international treaty.
The plan, first suggested a year ago, "has been gaining a lot of traction over the last couple of months," Artur Runge-Metzger, head of the European Commission's climate and energy unit, said in an interview in Bonn, where delegates are gathered for two weeks of talks.
Mexico, trying to bridge the gap between developing countries and wealthier nations ahead of December's climate summit in Copenhagen, is proposing states pay into and are able to receive monies from a fund that may amount to $10 billion a year to help all of them adapt to the effects of global warming.
"As a piece of political engineering, it's very imaginative and deserves a great deal of support," Michael Zammit Cutajar, the U.N. official who chairs the main set of negotiations, said in Bonn. "Whether it flies, we have to wait and see but it's certainly up there in people's sights."
Most developing nations say the industrialized world should pay for their efforts to cope with and adapt to climate change, including cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Richer nations, meanwhile, remain wary of offering ever-larger sums of money so financing has become a key element of the U.N. treaty talks.
By widening contributions to include rich and less-fortunate nations, the fund may amount to $10 billion a year that countries can tap into for global warming-related costs, said Fernando Tudela, one of the Mexican authors of the plan.
FUNDS MULTIPLIED
"You can stay with the current system of donor nations and recipients and then you'd get a small fund or you can move to a more integrated scheme where the funds would be multiplied by up to 10," Tudela said yesterday in an interview in Bonn, Germany. "It's a system that's inclusive."
Funds could be used to pay for activities including increasing the use of energy-efficient lighting in homes and businesses and capturing power-plant emissions and storing them underground, Mexico said in its proposal.
Mexico, classed as a developing country by the United Nations, is proposing all countries pay an amount into a fund based on their economic output, population and fossil-fuel output. Adaptation measures to be funded could include walls and dikes to protect against rising sea levels, irrigation networks to cope with lower rainfall in other regions and enhanced forest-fire prevention measures.
POORER NATIONS GET MORE
Poorer countries would receive more than they put in and there would be a cap on what a single nation would get. The fund would be supervised by member-states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, avoiding bodies like the World Bank, which developing countries say doesn't favor them.
Jonathan Pershing, the lead U.S. negotiator in Bonn, said the plan contains "a number of features that we quite like," including its governance structure.
Many developing countries are wealthy enough to contribute to such a fund, including China, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, Pershing said in an interview.
"As we look at the developed-developing country divide, there's an artificiality to it," Pershing said.
Another proposal, by Norway, would establish a fund that receives part of the proceeds of auctions in developed nations of allowances to emit carbon dioxide. A plan by China and the G77, a group of 130 developing nations, would have industrialized countries pay up to 1 percent of their economic output into a fund for less wealthy nations.
"If they go that way, they won't get adequate funding," Tudela said. "I'd also support the G77 proposal if it stood any chance."
`STILL OWE MONEY?'
Bernarditas Muller, a delegate from the Philippines who negotiates for the G77 and China, said in an interview that she will push her bloc's plan because industrialized nations have a historic responsibility for causing rising temperatures.
"If I owe you money and your aunt just died and you became richer, do I still owe you money?" Muller said. "Of course I do. That's it, that's the climate debt."
Still, she added, "we have talked to the Mexicans about it and we're going to find a way which we can consolidate our positions."
Mexico's Tudela said while in theory all nations would pay into the fund, countries classed by the U.N. as Least Developed and Small Island Developing States wouldn't have to pay "because it's so little there's no point in collecting it."
WHY WOULD BOLIVIA PAY?
While more than 70 countries would have to pay nothing, some poorer nations would still have to contribute, including Bolivia, which in 2007 had a gross domestic product per person of $1,126, when adjusted for inflation at 2000 prices, according to World Bank figures on Bloomberg.
"It's unacceptable for a country like Bolivia," delegation chief Angélica Navarro said in an interview.
"We're losing our glaciers. We have cities including the capital which could end up without drinking water - that's more than a million people. We could have internal climate refugees and they're asking us on top of that to pay for a problem that we didn't cause? Explain to me the logic." |
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