India questions OECD climate fund report

India on Sunday questioned the “correctness” of an OECD report claiming significant progress on a road map for $100 billion a year climate-change financing by 2020.

A positive signal that rich nations are on the road to meeting their 2020 commitment, which was first made at a 2009 UN conference, is crucial to a final climate agreement in Paris.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday left for Paris to participate in the crucial climate summit.

Economic affairs secretary Shaktikanta Das said here that at the recent Lima World Bank/IMF meetings, India had raised questions on the correctness of the recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report that claimed that significant progress had already been made on a road map for $100 billion annually in climate-change financing by 2020.

The Prime Minister expressed his views in his foreword to a discussion paper titled “Climate Change Finance, Analysis of a Recent OECD Report: Some Credible Facts Needed” prepared by the Climate Change Finance Unit, Department of Economic Affairs.

The secretary said the conclusion of the review by the unit is that the “OECD report appears to have overstated progress ... paper suggests that much more work has to be done. We need to establish more credible, accurate, and verifiable numbers on the true size of the mobilisation of climate change finance commitments and flows from developed to developing countries.”

The study by the OECD, along with the Climate Policy Initiative in October, had claimed that rich nations spurred $61.8 billion in public and private funds in 2014 to help poor countries combat and adapt to climate change. This is nearly two thirds of the key international goal to raise $100 billion a year starting in 2020.

However, the paper prepared by India said OECD numbers “were derived on self-reported basis from self-interested players, and open to ‘gaming’ and exaggeration”. “Meaningful independent verification was impossible since only aggregate numbers were reported — with lack of transparency. No serious consultations were done with the developing countries themselves,” it said.

The discussion paper said there “are some issues as to why there was so much rush to produce a document with inflated numbers, what has been termed as ‘green-washing’ of finance”, It added: “At this time, the actual cross-border flows from 17 special climate funds since their inception are some $2.2 billion. This was reported by relatively independent and credible sources as disbursements of climate change finance from developed to developing countries. This is far from the $100 billion a year goal.”