COP27 summit agrees on landmark climate ‘loss and damage’ fund, but does little to encourage rapid cuts to fossil fuel use to slow global warming
This article is more than 3 years old
This article is more than 3 years old
A small UK climate action fund designed to match private sector cash with public sector lending could be worth £2bn by 2020, despite just 1% of UK wealth being invested in climate change, the climate secretary, Michael Gove, has announced.
But UK ministers insisted that the proposal – the UK’s first attempt to set up a global fund to help finance action internationally on the scale needed to reduce global warming emissions – was urgent.
But the money will not – despite the commitment to a $100bn fund – come from the UK. The fund would be funded entirely by public-sector investors.
The announcement follows the news that the summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Saturday agreed on a plan for financing the international climate deal to limit global warming to 1.5C (2.7F) that could be reached if nations commit to rapid action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
But the fund – the idea for which first came to Gove during his time as environment secretary under Theresa May – won’t be ready until 2020 at the earliest. And it won’t start generating money until well after 2020.
The proposed fund is designed to channel money raised from private investors into public sector-led lending programmes and support for new technologies which cut carbon emissions in countries vulnerable to the effects of rising temperatures, the Guardian understands.
Gove’s announcement is the latest in a series of steps Britain has taken to push governments towards global action on climate. His first official act as environment secretary was to create the Global Carbon Capture Initiative, which will launch this month in California. Britain’s contribution to the fund will be funded privately.
The fund would not involve any change in UK policy or funding levels, Gove said.
As ministers from a small number of countries gathered
