An International Coal and Climate summit organised by the Polish Ministry of Economy and the World Coal Association kicked off Monday in the Polish capital Warsaw in parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP19, amid outcry from environmentalists who accused COP host Poland of bias in favor of the coal industry.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF), created under the auspices of the United Nations to finance the huge investments demanded by climate change, was opened up to participation by civil society and private sector representatives as observers in March.
The Climate Change Fund set up in November in Mexico faces enormous challenges such as the enforcement of anti-corruption standards, which make it unlikely that concrete actions will begin this year, according to civil society organisations.
Adaptation and mitigation. Identified by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and by scientists as the two major responses to address the problem, these were also the twin preoccupations of a climate change conference held recently in Dhaka.
The new Green Climate Fund to help developing countries cope with climate change may one day have a bigger budget than the World Bank. At the moment, however, the Fund is empty.
The upcoming United Nations climate talks may have a renewed sense of urgency with a new World Bank report warning that the planet is on a dangerous path to four degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100.