As the excitement starts building up for COP26, now less than 40 days away, it would be good if the Glasgow meeting of countries on the Climate Change issue sees some concrete progress on the critical issue of Climate financing support for developing nations.
It would really be unfortunate if this much looked forward to meeting ends up in either of the following scenarios:
- Rich countries make fresh promises of doing their bit on Climate financing, but no roadmap is agreed on at the meeting when the money would start flowing to the developing nations
- Some of the wealthier countries use the COP26 platform to hard-sell their own Climate-related initiatives (including those still at a rudimentary planning stage) to make the point that they are more than doing their bit to address the Climate emergency that humanity faces, or
- Select developed countries use the COP26 meeting primarily to sermonize to developing nations about the need for the latter to raise their Climate ambitions.
Richer countries cannot turn a blind eye to how they have contributed to bringing things to such a pass on the Climate front. Naturally, therefore, they have a bigger responsibility than developing nations to do that little bit extra on the Climate issue.
Let me clarify at this point, though, that I am not for a moment suggesting that developing nations shouldn’t be playing their own part to tackle the Climate Change issue, including making the transition to clean energy sources. The only thing that I am trying to emphasize here is that it may seemingly be unfair to ask developing nations to come up with ‘ambitious’ Climate agendas without providing them the monetary cushion that they need to balance Climate goals with their own developmental agendas.
One would hope that the United Nations would step in to ensure that developing countries don’t end up getting the short end of the stick during the Climate negotiations at Glasgow.