UN climate change body calls for forum to help deploy climate finance

The United Nations’ main climate change body is calling for the establishment of a climate finance forum to help deploy investment for developing countries.

It follows a series of brainstorming sessions in Bonn in July and Cape Town last month by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change looking at ways to promote long-term financing of climate change solutions.

One of the recommendations to come out of the sessions is the idea of setting up a climate finance forum bringing together all stakeholders.

“We recommend the establishment of a regular climate finance forum and a market place, bringing together all relevant actors – public and private sector and other stakeholders – to build an effective response and rapidly increase the deployment of finance for mitigation and climate resilient development,” write the co-chairs of the body’s long-term finance programme in a report on the sessions.

“It is of paramount importance to maintain a close dialogue and information exchange within and across climate finance related processes under the Convention, and also with processes and actors outside this domain,” say Georg Børsting and Zaheer Fakir. The former is Policy Director at the Norwegian Ministryof Foreign Affairs while the latter is at South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs.

Among the forum participants would be investors such as pension funds, insurance companies and banks. Indeed, one of the speakers at the Bonn meeting was Erik Jan Stork, Senior Sustainability Specialist at APG Asset Management, who is also part of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC).

Although such private sector investors already constitute important sources of climate finance, there was however “significant potential to increase their roles in mobilizing investments for projects and programmes in developing countries”.

The report argues that the UNFCC, along with international financial institutions and development banks, can play an important role in engaging investors in directing climate finance – and in assessing the investment opportunities and risks of climate change.

The report comes ahead of a major UN climate change meeting in Doha, Qatar which starts at the end of this month. It also looks at the political process, which it says should focus on sources and options for mobilizing climate finance in the short, medium and long terms. There was also a need for better tracking of both private and public climate finance. Relevant UNFCCC page