Recommended Cows grazing in front of a power plant Blog Post Development and Climate Finance Targets Charles Kenny December 17, 2024 Smoking factory smokestacks against blue sky. Blog Post The $300 Billion COP-Out Jonathan Beynon et al. November 28, 2024 Globe and global currency BRIEFS The Case for More Pull Financing Ranil Dissanayake and Bernat Camps Adrogué June 08, 2023 Climate finance is a disaster. COP29 ended with a hotly contested and almost universally loathed agreement for rich countries to provide $300 billion each year to developing countries, to defray the costs of adapting to and mitigating the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Commentators from the developing world ( and my colleagues ) have been scathing in their assessment of the inadequacy of this deal. My colleague Charles Kenny has described the existing structure of climate finance as “the worst of all worlds,” that disadvantages the poorest countries. He argues that the greater legal and political standing for climate finance, compared to development finance and the tight-fisted attitude of rich countries means there is no good solution available. All of this has roots in one of the most pernicious errors that development and climate activists routinely make: the misapprehension that because two things are both good things for the world, and matter very much for poor countries they need to be tackled together, through the same mechanisms. But the stakes here are high. Both global poverty and development and climate change are too important for human welfare to accept that both will just be done badly for the foreseeable future. In this piece, I do four things. I set out the underlying economics that make action against climate change and its negative consequences complicated to fund; I explain what a perfect—utopian—financing structure would look like and how it differs […]