By Reuben Makomere
Long term finance for climate change has long been a critical issue in confronting climate change. It was given much more priority since the UNFCCC Conference of Parties 17 in Durban in the year 2011 when a decision was made to undertake a program on the issue. This was one of the ways to enhance efforts towards mobilizing climate change finance from the year 2012.
This was the key agenda in the First Meeting of Experts on Long Term Finance held on the 16th-17th July 2013. Various avenues were explored and utilized in order to realize the desirable levels of climate change financial resources.
Several sessions have been held on the issue with the first session held from the 9th-11th of July 2012 in the German city of Bonn.
The main goal of the session was to enhance further understanding on long term finance and coming up with ways to further ensure effective deployment of the program. The workshop highlighted the work to be done in addition to addressing key issues affecting long term finance such as information gaps and looking in to the options available for climate financing.
The 2nd meeting was held in Cape Town South Africa from the 1st-3rd of October 2012 focusing on enhancing climate finance and creating conducive environments for the same. At the UNFCCC Conference of Parties18 in Doha the work program of the Long Term Finance was extended with two main areas of focus.
The first was essentially to assist developing countries in looking into ways of mobilizing enhanced finance up to the tune of 100 Billion US Dollars by the year 2020. The other focus area was ensuring that there was a conducive environment to enhance the mobilization and utilization of the finance particularly in developing countries.
Indeed these discussions went further into another meeting held in Bonn on the 3rd of May 2013 with further emphasis placed on scaling up mobilization efforts particularly from developed countries with the aim of obtaining the goal set to be achieved by 2020. Submissions on ways of achieving this were to be presented to the Conference of Parties 19, later this year.
Image credit: Menscosmo.com
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Reuben Makomere is the co-founder of GreenBits Initiative
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