by: John Sauven
Gordon Brown is part of the UN advisory group that must agree to find the $150bn a year needed to combat climate change
Today (31st March), the high-level advisory group on climate change financing will meet for the first time in London. The group will be chaired by Gordon Brown and his Ethiopian counterpart Meles Zenawi, and will include many finance ministers as well as independent financial experts like Lord Nicholas Stern and George Soros.
This gathering of financial "wizards" has been asked identify new ways to raise the money needed to protect all of us from the risks of dangerous climate change. Conservative estimates put this requirement at around $150bn (£100bn) a year by 2020. The figure seems high, but represents just a fraction of the world's annual spending on military budgets, which today tops $1.2tn. It is no longer far-fetched to suggest that reducing climate risk is every bit as necessary as more conventional methods of protecting national interests.
Investment at this scale would help secure a future for our last remaining tropical forests, home to the majority of the world's species and critical to maintaining regional rainfall patterns upon which whole economies depend. It would also allow poorer countries to develop clean technology, improving energy access, creating new markets and spurring innovation.
Finally, it would enable vulnerable communities to adapt to changes in their environment, reducing the risks of famine, mass migration and armed conflict.
The prime minister and his guests will not be short of options to consider. Financial transaction taxes are capable of raising several hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Capping pollution from international shipping and aviation could also generate tens of billions, as could the use of IMF special drawing rights. Any one of these approaches would provide reliable funding, with minimal impacts on ordinary people and national treasuries.
Yet during last year's UN climate negotiations, each of these solutions was rejected by one or more national governments. For some, the excuse was a distrust of "international taxes" – the United States, for example, has already signalled its rejection of an international financial transaction tax. For others, the issue was sectoral and focused on national interests. The Chinese government continues to insist on rejecting any cap and trade scheme for international shipping on the grounds that limits on this massive industry would infringe its development rights.
This kind of approach contributed to the unsightly diplomatic squabble for which Copenhagen will be remembered. The task for the advisory group is to live up to its name, and transcend such stale posturing. Without new sources of money which operate "off-balance sheet", there is no chance of raising the money we need to tackle climate change, and without this money there is no chance of a global deal. Any leader who claims to want such an agreement should therefore now be judged on how easy — or difficult — they make it for the advisory group to say "yes".
• This article was amended at 14:32 on 31 March 2010. In the editing process a mathematical error was introduced into sentence "The figure seems high, but represents just a fraction of the world's annual spending on military budgets, which today tops $1.2tn", calling this fraction "a thousandth". This mistake, which was not the author's, has now been corrected
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