Environment and Development - Developed countries are being far from transparent about the climate-change finance they promised to developing nations at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, according to a scorecard published Monday by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). The scorecard’s authors urge international negotiators who are gathering for talks under the UN Framework on Climate Change next week in Panama to set up an independent registry of climate finance that includes project-level information.

Norway ranked top on the scorecard, but with a score of only 52 percent, while New Zealand came last with just 26 percent.

According to IIED, the generally low scores mask progress in some areas and show that countries are not consistent in being transparent about all aspects of their funding.

The scorecard’s authors said the overall lack of transparency hindered efforts to monitor where the money went and ensure it was spent responsibly. It also meant that recipient countries may struggle to plan their responses to climate change.

The scorecard assesses how transparent countries have been in the delivery of US$30 billion of ‘new and additional’ funds, which they agreed to provide to developing countries between 2010 and 2012.

To evaluate the transparency of these reports, David Ciplet and J. Timmons Roberts at Brown University in the United States, Martin Stadelmann at the Centre for Comparative and International Studies, ETH and University of Zurich and Saleemul Huq and Achala Chandani at IIED created a scorecard based on 25 criteria in three groups: Is the summary information adequate and clear?
Are the methods for measuring and allocating climate finance clearly defined? And are data presented for individual projects?

Countries varied greatly across these three groups of criteria: Australia scored 73 percent for summary information, but 17 percent for its baseline information and zero percent for its project data.

“A transparent system for reporting on climate finance is essential to make sure that funds are adequate, predictable and used responsibly,” said Ciplet. “Greater transparency will be critical to building trust in the international negotiations towards a global agreement on how to tackle climate change.”

The scorecard’s authors have called for a comprehensive registry of funds, with a standard format for donor countries to use when reporting on the climate finance they have disbursed.

They said the registry should provide accessible and comprehensive national reporting including an assessment of whether or not funding is new and additional; provide detailed project data that allow civil society to verify that funds are delivered and used responsibly; and delineate public funds from private and carbon market funds, adaptation funding from other types of funding, and grants from loans.

“Transparency is as important for taxpayers in the North as it is for climate-vulnerable countries in the South,” remarked Dr Saleemul Huq, senior fellow in the climate change group at IIED. “Transparent reporting is essential to enable recipient countries to plan their responses to climate change and for civil society to hold governments to account on their promises.”                 

Pana 19/09/2011