COP26: UK’s Johnson announces £5.4bn climate finance package

At the opening of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow today, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new funding package worth £5.4bn ($4bn) aimed at contributing to developed countries’ Paris Agreement pledge to provide $100 billion annually in climate finance to their developing counterparts. 

Part of the UK’s Clean Green Initiative, the funding will support the rollout of sustainable infrastructure and green technology in low-income countries. The pledges include: 

• A package of guarantees to the World Bank and the African Development Bank to provide £2.2bn for investments in climate-related projects in India – supporting India’s target to achieve 450GW of renewable energy installed capacity by 2030 – and across Africa; 
• A commitment for the UK’s development finance institution, CDC Group, to deliver more than £3bn of climate financing for green growth over the next five years. This will include £200m for a new Climate Innovation Facility to support the scale-up of technologies that will help communities deal with the impacts of climate change, and represents a doubling of the amount of climate finance CDC invested in its previous strategy period from 2017-2021;  
• A commitment for The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office-backed Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) to provide more than £210m in new investment to back green projects in developing countries such as Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Nepal and Chad.

 The pledges follow last week’s publication of the $100 billion delivery plan, led by the Canadian and German governments, which conceded that the annual funding pledge would not be met until 2023. 

“As we look at the green industrial revolution that’s needed around the world, we in the developed world must recognise the special responsibility we have to help everybody else to do it,” said Johnson in his opening ceremony remarks. 

“We now have a duty to find those funds: $100 billion a year, which was promised in Paris by 2020 but which we now won’t now deliver until 2023, to help the rest of the world to move to green technology.”

 “But we cannot and will not succeed by government spending alone… We in this room have hundreds of billions but the market has hundreds of trillions. And the task now is to work together to decarbonise; using our funds in development assistance, and working with all the multilateral development banks, so that, in key countries that need to make progress, we can jointly identify the projects we can help to de-risk so that the private sector money can come in.” 

Around 120 leaders have gathered in Glasgow today to kickstart COP26, launching two weeks of global negotiations to help determine whether humanity can drive forward the urgent action needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. 

Negotiations surrounding climate finance – scheduled to start on Wednesday – will centre on how the countries most vulnerable to climate change can access the finance needed to deliver climate adaptation and boost green recovery from the pandemic.