A new report from Development Initiatives, titled ‘Climate finance: Earning trust through consistent reporting,’ explores the climate finance reporting landscape and highlights a central issue: there is no agreement on how climate finance should be defined.
This, it says, has allowed providers to adapt their methodologies for tracking it in order to meet political targets more easily.
Likewise, it outlines that different countries count similar projects in different ways, meaning that their estimates of climate finance provision are not comparable.
“This makes it impossible to accurately assess which countries are providing climate finance support that matches their means.”
Further, it outlines that there are so few restrictions on what activities providers can claim as climate-relevant that there cannot be confidence that the finance reported is “really addressing those needs.”
“There is even a lack of consistency in the data countries self-report to different organisations.”
In the immediate absence of a definition, the report explores ways in which consistency in reporting could be improved.
It recommends that:
- Transparency requirements need to be expanded,
- Climate finance assessment should be as granular as possible,
- Parties should consider using novel techniques to ease capacity constraints,
- The existing UNFCCC peer review process should be strengthened,
- Countries should report on impact estimates before and after implementation where possible,
- There should be official guidance from the UNFCCC on a case-by-case approach to assessing the ‘climate share’ of projects.
For the full report, head here.