YLE: Finland pledges climate funding at global summits, cuts it at home

LEADING Finnish policy-makers are touring international climate conferences pledging climate financing for developing countries all the while making dramatic cuts in the financing at home, reports YLE. President Alexander Stubb on Tuesday announced a

By: helsinkitimes.fi

Nov 17 2024
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YLE: Finland pledges climate f

LEADING Finnish policy-makers are touring international climate conferences pledging climate financing for developing countries all the while making dramatic cuts in the financing at home, reports YLE.

President Alexander Stubb on Tuesday announced at Cop-29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, that Finland will channel additional financing to poor countries, calling particular attention to island states that are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to rising sea levels.

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs later specified that the country will contribute 2.5 million euros to the Systematic Observations Finance Facility (SOFF), a financing instrument designed to enable countries with the most severe weather and climate data gap to procure and institute systems for the early detection of floods and other extreme weather events.

A similar announcement was made at Cop-28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, in 2023. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) pledged at his opening remarks at the conference that the government would pay three million dollars into the newly established loss and damage fund.

Both announcements suggest a double standard, YLE wrote on Thursday.

Finnish Development NGOs (Fingo) calculated in a report published earlier this month that the current government will cut climate financing to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros by the end of the electoral term. Most of the cuts, it highlighted, appear to be targeted at key mechanisms of climate financing, including the largest climate fund in the world, the Green Climate Fund.

A critical element of the Paris Agreement, the Fund has provided financial support to countries replacing fossil with renewable energy sources.

Fingo reported that the national contribution to the fund will be slashed from 100 million to 60 million euros, in line with an announcement made last year by Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Ville Tavio (PS). Another 17 million euros, the report reveals, is to be saved by cutting off funding entirely for the Adaptation Fund, the Least Developed Countries Fund, Climate Risk and Early Warnings System (CREWS) and SOFF.

Stubb on Tuesday thus effectively promised to restore most of the three million euros that had already been earmarked for SOFF.

“They’ve now simply called off the plan to cut off funding,” Niko Humalisto, an advocacy specialist at the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission (Felm), commented to YLE from Baku on Tuesday.

While the promise is a step in the right direction, he criticised the government for double standards. The EU is presently the largest source of climate financing worldwide, with the amount contributed to various financial mechanisms in principle growing.

“Finland is moving in the wrong direction. This is a good example of free-riding,” said Humalisto.

Aleksi Teivainen – HT