A new report has suggested that more transparency on the part of developing countries about the cost of essential climate mitigation and adaptation requirements could help unlock private and public funding.
The report, State of Transition in Sovereigns 2024: Tracking national climate action for investors, was developed by the investor-led Assessing Sovereign Climate-related Risks and Opportunities (ASCOR) project, and assessed 70 countries’ climate change policies and ambitions.
While noting that ‘developed countries are making insufficient contributions to international climate finance’, it also claims that only one third of developing countries have been ‘transparent’ about their financial needs when it comes to tackling climate impacts.
‘Targeted transition finance could help emerging market and developing economies to harness low-carbon technologies and establish climate policies while they continue to focus on development priorities,’ the report states.
NDC ambitions
It also claims that no country has currently set a 2030 NDC target that is ‘ambitious enough’ to align with the 1.5C benchmark, but two countries – Costa Rica and Angola – come very close.
Other findings include that only 16% of countries have a clear commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, while 81% of wealthy nations are currently not contributing their proportional share to agreed climate finance goals.
The report also notes that while 80% of the countries assessed have a net-zero target in place, only a handful are aiming for a net-zero deadline before 2050.
Barbados and Norway have set a net-zero target of 2030, while Finland, Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden aim for 2045 or earlier.
By and large, countries are also ‘performing poorly’ on efforts to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and production, with Hong Kong, Peru and Uruguay the only countries assessed in the study that do not currently subsidise fossil fuels.
‘Climate policy gaps’
“Our findings highlight important climate policy gaps: it is especially concerning that only a few countries have made robust commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies or production,” commented Antonina Scheer, policy fellow and research project manager at the Transition Pathway Initiative Centre (TPI Centre), which published the report.
“Countries need to demonstrate sound national transition planning, through costed mitigation measures and transparent climate-related budgets, for the next generation of NDCs to be investible. Transparency on these fronts will help channel much needed climate finance towards meeting the $1.3 trillion aim from public and private sources called for at COP29.” Read more here.
