Climate change aid and the upcoming Durban summit

The next UN Climate summit - technically the 17th "Conference of the Parties" to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - starts in less than a week in Durban, South Africa. The issues on the agenda, including the debate over continuation of the Kyoto architecture for emissions targets which did not include targets for developing nations, are contentious. The debate about the emissions targets, summarized briefly in a Nature News piece,  will likely dominate the coverage of the summit here in North America.

But the other, equally complicated and arguably as important, issue is the management and operation of the proposed $100 billion per year in climate change financing, which we discuss in our new article in Science (also see good recent coverage in Climate Wire and the Vancouver Sun, as well as the Canadian Press and Agence France Press; you may also contact me for a copy of the paper).

Success in planning the Green Climate Fund, the proposed body that will manage a significant proportion of the $100 billion per year, is critical to building the public and political will to provide the funds and to ensuring there are real results on the ground. It is also could be critical to creating the unity necessary to tackle the other contentious issues; as Timmons Roberts argued in the Nature News piece, the promise of funding to respond to climate change is one of the things that kept the developing countries at the negotiating table.