Climate change and big figures
The figure "$100bn" slips easily off the tongue. It is headline-catching. If there is a that figure may have helped break the deadlock. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States backed this vast fund to help the poorer countries adapt and to counter climate change.
While $100bn is big money, others had bigger figures in mind. The EU had suggested that $150bn would be needed each year by 2020 to help the developing world.
Some of the poorer nations wanted even more, perhaps $600bn.
These figures can only be estimates. No government or international agency can accurately cost the effects of climate change. They are guesses in the dark.
Yet $100bn would represent the biggest transfer of money from the rich to the developing world for a single issue. It is not precisely costed or matched against forthcoming projects or divided between countries. It is simply the price to get the developing world to agree to limit its emissions. It is a bigger figure than the total value of all development aid this year.
Yet history suggests it is wise to be wary of big figures. Firstly, where will the money come from? The United States is likely to chip in 20%. The EU has suggested its contribution will be somewhere between 22bn and 50bn euros. Now that is a wide gap. European countries have not decided which of them will pay what. Some eastern European countries are resisting making commitments when they are struggling to contain carbon emissions themselves.
Then there is the unsettled question of where this money will come from. There will be a divide between public funding and private sources. The US indicates that perhaps as much as 30% of its contribution will come from private sources. But which private sources and what will be their interest in contributing to such a fund?
The recent record of commitments made at summits being honoured is not good. I attended an emergency meeting in Jakarta after the Asian summit. Money was promised and leaders felt good. Many of the promises were not honoured.
In 2005 the G20 countries promised to raise aid for Africa by about $30bn a year. It still has not happened. And rich countries are having to pay down their debts and raise taxes. ( reports that in the United States there is broad opposition to spending taxpayer's money to encourage the developing world to curtail its emissions).
Many other questions follow: What are the projects that will get priority funding? Who will determine which country gets what? What is the formula? Who will ensure the money is spent wisely? Who will hold the rich countries to their pledges?
In the short-term there is a proposed $10bn fast-track fund to help poorer countries deal with climate change problems between now and 2012. How that money will be spent also remains unclear.
What the big figures represent is guilt and recognition that for decades the rich world has been harming and warming the planet. They may be fuzzy figures, but they may just have persuaded the developing world that the West will carry the burden for cleaning up the planet.
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