Confusion surrounds China’s pledged climate finance towards the Global South from qocsuing's blog

Confusion surrounds China’s pledged climate finance towards the Global South

Some experts suggested that China has “only delivered 10%” of the China South-South Climate Cooperation fund since it was announced eight years ago, calling the pace “quite slow”.To get more China finance news 2023, you can visit shine news official website.

Others said it would be “hard to tell” how much of the pledge has been fulfilled due to a lack of official updates.

Li Shuo, senior global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, described the fund’s details as “confusing” but believed that China “has not delivered as much as it promised”.

In 2015, China’s President Xi Jinping announced the fund during a state visit to the USA, months before unprecedented US-Chinese climate cooperation helped the world agree to the Paris agreement.
At the time, Xi said that China would “make available” 20 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) to help other developing countries tackle climate change. But he did not set a deadline for the fund’s delivery.

Delivery ‘not as promising’
China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said at Cop27 that China had provided 2 billion yuan ($310 million) to other developing countries, which are otherwise known as the Global South, to reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change.

Xie did not give more information about the figure. But E3G, a thinktank focused on climate change policy, interpreted Xie’s words as an update on the China South-South Climate Cooperation Fund.

It said in a recent analysis that China’s climate finance to the Global South “falls short” of its own pledge because the nation has delivered just one-tenth in seven years.
Byford Tsang, senior policy advisor at E3G, told Climate Home News that “at the current pace, I think it would take quite a long time [for China] to fulfil its pledge”. But he acknowledged that, as a developing country, China is not obliged to provide any formal climate finance.

Although it is possible that Beijing would give “an injection” to the fund to accelerate its delivery, “based on what has been achieved so far, it was not as promising as people were thinking during the start”, Tsang continued.

Institutional challenges
Tsang of E3G pointed to “institutional challenges” as reasons for the fund’s sluggish progress because it is managed by different ministries, which makes it complicated to disperse.

According to a study  published by China’s National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (NCSC), an affiliation to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment “multiple departments” are “involved” in China’s south-south cooperation on climate change.

“Apart from the newly established Ministry of Ecology and Environment (established in 2018), it also involves China International Development Cooperation Agency, the ministries of commerce, finance and foreign affairs, as well as the National Development and Reform Commission,” the study said.

It added that the China South-South Climate Cooperation had yet to be set up for various reasons, including lack of coordination – a fact that “had affected the progress of the south-south climate change cooperation and international reputation” of China.

“A common understanding is that the promised amount would need to be distributed by the fund. If the fund has not been established, then its delivery is an open question,” Li of Greenpeace East Asia told Climate Home News.

He said the overall situation is “unclear” because China has not reported the fund’s progress regularly. “On the other hand, China is not obliged to give such reports internationally,” he added. Duan Hongbo is a professor at the School of Economics and Management at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He said that the politics and attitude of potential recipient countries – most of which are the least developed in the world – also play a role. For example, some countries constantly change their points of contact and others “are more interested in projects that would boost their economy than combat climate change.” The Covid-19 pandemic also delayed global cooperation, he said.

But some observers urge China to make bigger strides. Belinda Schäpe, policy adviser at E3G, told Climate Home News: “China hasn’t put a timeline on the fund. But for it to actually have an impact, it should happen faster.”

As China sees the south-south climate cooperation as a way to “portray itself as the responsible leader power”, to keep that leadership of the developing world and its credibility as the climate leader, accelerating the delivery of its climate fund is the “rational next step”, she added.