Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Rich countries' proposal to bypass governments on climate aid rejected

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): Efforts by rich countries to give $100bn (£66bn) a year of 'climate aid' direct to companies, bypassing poorer countries' governments, have suffered a setback. The UN's fledgling Green Climate Fund (GCF) is designed to transfer money in the future from the developed to developing world, to tackle the impacts of climate change, such as floods and droughts.

Papers seen by the Guardian following a tense GCF board meeting in South Korea show that rich countries led by the US, Britain and Australia pushed for the World Bank-run fund to be able to bypass the governments of poor countries by giving money intended to help them directly to rich countries' companies. Under this scenario, large contracts for climate change adaptation works in developing countries might have been awarded by the fund to international companies rather than to host governments.

They also lobbied hard for the fund to be able to act like an autonomous bank, taking risks, guaranteeing loans, having its own governing body and even being able to speculate with climate funds.

But the 24-strong board of the new fund voted down the proposal for the GCF to act like a bank and denied rich countries the independent governing structure for the private sector that they sought...

An opera = plutocracy, maybe. Peng, edited, masked and converted to PNG by Wikipeder 2007-07-21, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

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