Green Climate Fund to discuss $100 billion pledged by rich countries

Fiona Harvey in the Guardian (UK): The fate of billions of dollars of promised funding from rich countries to help the developing world adapt to climate change will be discussed on Thursday in Geneva, at the first meeting of the UN's Green Climate Fund.

The fund is meant to be the biggest single funding route for the $100bn (£63bn) that developed countries have pledged should flow to poor nations each year by 2020, to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the effects of global warming.

But key decisions – such as where the fund should be headquartered, who should run it, how it will operate and how it can raise funds – will be delayed for months. ... A final decision on the GCF's location – Germany, Namibia, and other countries have all offered to be the host – is understood to be unlikely before the end of the year.

All of the other important issues around the GCF, including how much money it is likely to have to disburse and how it will raise funds from the private sector, are matters of contention. The fund is unlikely to have much sway over the initial round of "fast-start" financing from rich to poor countries that was agreed at the Copenhagen summit in 2009. Most of the $30bn (£19bn) pledged at Copenhagen has now been committed, and most of it is already earmarked for various projects. For instance, the UK is on track to provide £1.5bn between 2010-13 and about £1bn of this has already been committed to bilateral and multilateral projects developed with poor countries, or is being channelled through existing funding routes....

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