The president had promised 11.4 billion for climate finance
(sustainabilityenvironment.com) – Just 1 billion dollars. Less than a tenth of what Biden had promised. And nothing more than the fortieth part of what the United States should pay for taking into account historical issues. This is the amount allocated to the climate funds for which the US Congress gave the green light.
A sign of weakness of the Biden administration. That it failed to retouch upwards the skimpy figure. Although between the first proposal and the vote has changed a lot on the climate finance front, with the agreement reached at COP27 to create by 2023 a fund for damage and losses for the most vulnerable countries. That requires willingness to increase -and significantly- the climate funds.
Instead, the US 2023 will be the year in which Washington will pull out nothing but the same figure already approved in 2022: $1.057 billion, an increase of 0.09% over last year. This despite the fact that President Biden had promised, in recent months, to bring the contribution to stars and stripes to 11.4 billion $. Promise to be kept by 2024, He said: but in the year of the elections it will be even more difficult to convince Congress to gestures of great generosity and to be more sensitive to the issues of climate justice.
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Also a bad sign for climate diplomacy. While the rich countries have yet to reach the target of $100 billion a year promised in 2009, we must also start discussing concrete figures for the near future. And developing countries continue to put the spotlight on historical emissions as a criterion for calculating financial shares for the climate due. From this perspective, the United States should pay between 40 and 50 billion dollars a year, calculates the Overseas Development Insttute.
