Kevin P. GallagherandJianyu Zhang

Opinion | China is already a climate finance leader despite West’s finger-pointing

While China must do better in making clear its climate leadership, the rest of the world should stop looking for scapegoats and start paying up

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Huang Runqiu, minister of ecology and environment, speaks at a session at the China Pavilion during the Cop29 UN Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 15. Photo: AP

Kevin P. GallagherandJianyu Zhang

Published: 4:30pm, 19 Nov 2024Updated: 6:27pm, 19 Nov 2024

The world’s climate leaders have gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the latest UN climate conference. It takes place in the midst of warnings that if the global community does not cut emissions by 42 per cent by 2030 and 57 per cent by 2035, we will not be able to avoid the catastrophic costs of climate change.

The good news is that thanks to advances in China, Japan, Europe and the United States, the technology that is needed to meet these targets stands ready. All that is necessary is to provide the right incentives and financing. The bad news is that rather than rising to the challenge, negotiations on financing appear mired in a finger-pointing exercise where some countries are blaming others for not paying their fair share of the cost.

It is simply not the case that China lags behind in this aspect. New research indicates that China is a leader in global climate finance. In the alphabet soup of United Nations climate acronyms, what is at stake is the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance.

Rich nations pledged at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 to provide US$100 billion of climate finance to developing countries by 2020. Those countries only made good on that goal in 2022, and now many of them are calling on India and China to step up and contribute as well.

Pointing fingers at China, which is already a leader in climate finance, will not cause it to raise its ambitions. A paper released in September by the Washington-based Centre for Global Development puts China’s climate finance contributions at about US$34 billion by 2021, or US$4 billion annually since 2013.

The World Resources Institute, a global authority on climate finance, employed the same methodology that the United Nations uses for climate finance but adopted a broader range of available data sets. It found that from 2013 to 2022 China provided upwards of US$45 billion. This would put China sixth in global climate finance contributions, behind Japan, Germany, the US, France and the United Kingdom.