With the United Nations climate talks wrapping up in Dubai, foundations and other funders pledged at least $2.1 billion in new financing to reduce climate impacts, especially from agriculture, and increasing help for vulnerable communities.

The Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC, or COP28 summit, featured numerous firsts, including forums on health, food production and philanthropy. The estimated pledges, which do not represent a complete account of philanthropic commitments at COP28, came from a mix of foundations and private companies with some made in partnership with governments. They will be delivered over a range of timelines.

For the first time, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria sent a delegation to the conference, pledging to spend 70% of its budget, about $9 billion, in the 50 most climate vulnerable countries over the next three years.

"The honest answer is that the global health community, including us, was so focused on COVID-19, that we probably didn’t pay enough attention to all the signs of what climate change was doing to global health," said Peter Sands, CEO of the Global Fund.

His organization also launched a set of principles for financing projects at the intersection of climate and health along with the World Health Organization, the Green Climate Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation and COP presidency.

The first Business & Philanthropy forum offered foundations, donors and corporations a larger formal role at a time when COP28 leaders are looking to secure more financing from the private sector.

According to a report from ClimateWorks Foundation released earlier this month, philanthropic funding for climate change mitigation was essentially unchanged in 2022, after showing consistent growth for the past three years. The lack of growth is attributed to global economic conditions, including increased inflation.

“Every sector of society must do more to contribute, including philanthropy,” said Helene Desanlis, ClimateWorks’ director of climate philanthropy for global intelligence, which she said includes both increasing funding amounts and collaborating more closely with other funders and actors.

The forum announced new blended finance vehicles, which can fund initiatives through a mix of corporate investments and donations, as well as a call to direct funding for Indigenous peoples already working to protect the environment in their communities.

Ozawa Bineshi Albert, co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, which advocates for people and organizations in frontline communities affected by climate change, said it’s a welcome idea to increase funding for Indigenous peoples, who she says always face an uphill battle to be heard in these meetings.

“It would be generous for me to say I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Albert. “There’s a difference between folks advocating to be benevolent caretakers of Indigenous people versus Indigenous people being at the table because they’

Albert said the Business & Philanthropy forum can be helpful, but government policy and regulation, especially in reducing carbon production, would be far more helpful.

“Should they and could they do more? Absolutely,” she said.“ Do I think their investment in this is going to rescue us from the crisis we’re in? No. The government still has to act. If we’re not reducing and eliminating the production of carbon with our energy sources, no matter how much philanthropy invests, we will never be able to dig out of the hole.”

Christie Ulman, president of the Sequoia Climate Foundation, which focuses on driving down emissions in part through transitioning to clean energy, said she is supporting their grantee organizations and partners at COP in advocating for ambitious targets for renewable energy and decreasing other pollutants like methane.

“We also are there encouraging the fossil fuel phase out agenda and mainstreaming that,” she said of her organization's role at the summit. Along with multiple other philanthropic funders, Sequoia announced a $450 million commitment to target the reduction of methane and other pollutants over three years.

Last year, Sequoia along with some of the same funders, pledged $500 million over three years to accelerate the transition to clean energy sources in low- and middle-income countries. So far, Ullman said that coalition has granted out 40% of the commitment, or around $200 million.

Ulman said that the investments are targeted to support the plans and projects that countries have already made around energy transitions and she hopes that additional funding will follow.

The Bezos Earth Fund pledged $100 million to support a plan by Pacific Island nations to protect and sustainably manage marine ecosystems. Bloomberg Philanthropies also made commitments around protecting oceans, transitioning to clean energy and supporting cities adapting to climate change.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has long focused on food insecurity through developing tools and technology to help farmers adapt to climate change, announced a new commitment of $100 million along with the United Arab Emirates, who committed another $100 million. Some of those funds will go to CGIAR, an agricultural research group, which the Gates Foundation has supported with more than $1 billion in grants over time.

“No other effort to adapt to climate change will have more impact,” Gates said in prepared remarks, of CGIAR.

The Gates Foundation and other funders also pledged a collective $770 million to expand the work of a fund founded by the UAE to eliminate neglected tropical diseases, called Reaching the Last Mile Fund.

Sands, of the Global Fund, advocated for using the existing global health architecture as much as possible to diminish the burden on health systems in individual countries and called for swift action in the short term as climate change exacerbates health inequities around the world.

“Fundamentally what it’s doing is making those who are most vulnerable and least able to access health services even more vulnerable and even less able to access how health services,” he said.

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.


Poor countries need trillions of dollars to go green. A long-shot effort aims to generate the cash


JAMEY KEATEN
Updated Tue, December 12, 2023 





Activists participate in a demonstration at the COP28 U.N. Climate Summit, Dec. 8, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
 (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A large, long-shot effort is being developed to mobilize money to save Planet Earth.

Climate finance experts say trillions of dollars are needed for forestry projects and renewable energies like solar and wind in the developing world, all aimed at slashing pollution from the burning of oil, gas and coal, which cause climate change.

The price tag is eye-watering: Investment in energy-transition technologies were $1.3 trillion last year, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, an intergovernmental group, and that needs to at least quadruple to avoid a level of warming that scientists say would be catastrophic.

Even rich governments can't commit that kind of cash, and often struggle to get respective congresses and parliaments to sign off even on modest amounts.

Enter a plan to combine the cash-churning power of the private sector with carbon credits, a hot topic of discussion at the annual climate talks taking place in Dubai.

“It’s an enormous amount of capital to raise in a short time, so governments are going to have to be creative in terms of how they get there,” said Yousef Alhorr, founding chairman of the Global Carbon Council, an international carbon credit and sustainable development program based in oil-rich Qatar.

Carbon markets already exist and come with a good deal of baggage, so the plan has plenty of naysayers. Critics of the plan being developed say existing voluntary programs have been badly supervised — leading to cheating and rights abuses.

Proponents, like U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry, lenders like the World Bank, and the U.N. acknowledge the markets have room for improvement. They say their plan would improve monitoring and provide greater cash churn.

Such voluntary schemes would resemble carbon offsets like those long offered by airlines to travelers, who willingly pay an extra fee to compensate for the carbon generated by their flights, often to fund tree-planting projects or protection of existing forests.

The markets would work like this: Countries that take part could generate carbon credits based on projects aimed to meet their own climate goals, such as protecting existing forests from development or shutting coal-fired plants.

Private-sector players could then buy the credits, which would allow them to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. Heavy-polluting companies would be important customers.

Each credit would equal a ton of CO2 or the equivalent other greenhouse gases that can be reduced in the air, sequestered, or avoided by using green energies instead.

Money from the credits generated would go to local projects. The per-ton price of carbon would fluctuate in the market, meaning that the higher it rises, the more green projects could fetch through new credits generated.

In Dubai, the U.S. government along with the Bezos Earth Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation announced a project called the “Energy Transition Accelerator.” It aims to guide the plan by using “high-integrity” carbon crediting to weed out possible cheats and support local communities and populations.

Until now, accountability has been largely by independent registries of carbon markets. The ETA scheme would give governments a bigger role in ensuring that safeguards are built in.

Chile, Dominican Republic and Nigeria are pilot countries for the ETA, which aims to be established by Earth Day in April. Proponents estimate that $72 billion to $207 billion could be mobilized for transition to clean power projects by 2035.

It’s a voluntary program, and companies like Bank of America, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, and PepsiCo have signed a letter of interest in participating.

In the past, companies participating in other carbon markets have made false claims about projects, known as greenwashing, and some financiers, farmers and others count a single project multiple times – meaning that the benefits are overestimated. Some corporate cheaters have cranked up emissions only to later reduce them and claim credits for going greener.

Critics say carbon credit programs let polluters keep polluting and have siphoned focus away from the most important goal — an end of use of fossil fuels, which is the No. 1 cause of global warming.

“Buying offsets from carbon markets without phasing out fossil fuels will always be greenwashing,” said Erika Lennon, senior attorney at Climate & Energy at the Center for International Environmental Law.

Kerry admitted “some people abuse” carbon credit systems and “they have done an injustice to everybody.

"We believe it is more than cured in the approaches that we’ve put together,” he said during a Dec. 4 panel event at COP28, where he detailed the Energy Transition Accelerator.

Simon Stiell, the executive director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, cautioned against too much reliance on such programs. He said they “cannot substitute for government action” and should be coupled with “robust internal emissions cuts by the private sector.”

He called for new projects in agriculture, power storage, the retirement of fossil fuel assets, green hydrogen extracted through renewables, and electric mobility.

Still, it's hard to imagine governments footing the bill for energy transition at a massive scale.

Ajay Banga, the president of the World Bank, said unifying a fragmented market to create bigger scale is needed. The Washington-based multilateral bank has devised its own carbon credit program, the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.

In it, several countries including Guatemala, Vietnam and Congo plan over the next year to issue the first 24 million credits, and 11 other countries are lining up to join. The bank says the project hopes to get up to $2.5 billion through 2028.

“Ultimately, these credits have the potential to transfer billions of dollars to communities from companies and governments, voluntarily,” Banga told the panel event.

“This is hard, and we will be criticized: I’m pretty sure of that. We will make mistakes: I’m pretty sure of that,” he added. “But we will learn from them.”

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AP journalists Seth Borenstein and Sibi Arasu contributed to this report.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.


Heard at UN climate talks: Quotes that tell the story

PETER PRENGAMAN
Wed, December 13, 2023 







Britain's Minister for Climate Graham Stuart speaks during a plenary session at the COP28 U.N. Climate Summit, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

 (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Over 14 days of U.N. climate talks, delegates from nearly 200 countries debated, made proposals, lobbed criticisms and did their best to convince each other how best to stop the planet from warming at a dangerous pace.

Much of the discussion at COP28, hosted by the United Arab Emirates, was technical, on subjects ranging from climate science to sustainable development. But ultimately the summit was about people— tens of thousands who came to have their voices heard. Here is a sampling of quotes that tell the story.

“These allegations are false, not true, incorrect and not accurate." — COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber on Nov. 30.

On the first day of the summit, al-Jaber denied a BBC report that said the oil-rich United Arab Emirates planned to make deals for oil and renewable energies during the negotiations. Al-Jaber runs both the UAE’s national oil company and a renewable energy firm. Leading up to the talks, many environmentalists and even politicians around the world argued that somebody from the oil industry, which is responsible for much of the emissions that cause climate change, shouldn’t be overseeing a climate summit.

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“At the start of COP27 in Egypt last year, many people said it wouldn’t be agreed, let alone created in 12 months.” — Mohamed Adow, director of climate think tank Power Shift Africa, on Nov. 30.

Adow was referring to a fund to help poor countries being hammered by the extremes of climate change, such as floods, droughts and hurricanes. The fund was established on the first day of the summit after it was approved but not finalized last year. While there are many questions long term — namely how much will rich countries contribute? — its approval underscored that the world community believes developed nations, which are most responsible for climate change, have a moral imperative to help countries being severely affected.

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“We are here all together, all the world together, to combat climate change and really, we’re negotiating for what? We’re negotiating for what in the middle of a genocide?” — Hadeel Ikhmais, a climate change expert with the Palestinian Authority, on Dec. 1.

During the two weeks of negotiations, the war between Israel and Hamas cast a long shadow over the event. Several world leaders expressed solidarity with Palestinians and there were several small pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

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"The commitments to cut methane are significant, but they address the symptom, not the source.” — Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, on Dec. 2.

Fifty oil and gas companies said they would sharply reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, across their operations by 2030. While celebrated by some climate experts, others noted that the pledge was voluntary, so not enforceable, and argued that it allowed the industry to simply continue its core business of drilling, extraction and export of oil.

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“Well, I mean, it’s cheesy doing CPR on the Earth. We’re kind of in a lot of trouble right now ... anything we can do to bring attention to this issue.” — Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency room physician from Alberta, Canada, on Dec. 3.

For the first time in its history, the climate talks included health as one of its thematic days. As temperatures have crept up and extreme weather events have intensified, researchers are finding links between climate change and negative impacts on human health, including heat stroke, breathing problems and infectious diseases.

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“Please, help me, show me for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves." Al-Jaber, recorded in November, comments that surfaced Dec. 4.

The comments had the effect of a thunderclap. For environmentalists who opposed al-Jaber being COP28 president, it confirmed their narrative that an oil executive had no interest in leading the world toward less fossil fuel use. In a testy news conference the next day, al-Jaber said he had been taken out of context.

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“The last half year has truly been shocking. Scientists are running out of adjectives to describe this.” — Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess on Dec. 6.

As negotiators settled into the second week of the talks, scientists announced that November had been the sixth month in a row of record temperatures, an ominous reminder of how quickly the Earth is warming. Put another way, the discussions at COP28 had real world implications, something that many delegates mentioned.

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“We have to say how loud we’re going to be, what’s going to be written on the banners. We’re not allowed to name countries and corporations. So it’s really a very sanitized space.” — Lise Masson, from Friends of the Earth International, on Dec. 9.

While protests were allowed, as the tightly controlled UAE leadership had promised, there were so many restrictions that demonstrators said they struggled to be heard.

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“They’re scared. I think they’re worried." — Former Ireland President Mary Robinson on Dec. 9.

Robinson was speaking about the interests of oil and gas when it was reported that OPEC, the oil cartel, had written to member countries asking that they reject any agreement around phasing out fossil fuels.

__ “We will not go silently to our watery graves.” — Samuel Silk, Marshall Islands chief delegate and natural resources minister, on Dec. 11.

Silk was talking about a draft agreement that he and numerous others said had weak language on fossil fuels. The strong opposition to the initial draft would push delegates to negotiate for another two days.

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“Humanity has finally done what is long, long, long overdue.” — Wopke Hoekstra, European Union commissioner for climate action, on Dec. 13.

For the first time in 28 years of climate talks, delegates said in plain language that the world needed to transition away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. The upshot of that was a sharp ramping up of green energies like wind and solar. It will take years to judge what impact the decision has, but it has sent a clear message to the world about the need to radically shift its energy systems.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.