As the climate crisis intensifies, so, too, do its impacts on human rights. Addressing these impacts requires urgent, ambitious action and significant funding to support dramatic emissions reductions, adaptation to a rapidly changing world, and action on loss and damage due to climate change. This funding is colloquially known as climate finance.
Funding Our Future: Five Pillars for Rights-Based Climate Finance explores how climate finance can advance the principal goals of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement and protect human rights. Adequate climate finance must flow from those developed countries most responsible for the climate crisis to those developing countries least responsible for it, yet most adversely affected by it. Funding must reach those most in need, without creating new debt or compounding existing inequalities. Climate finance must support proven strategies and community-driven solutions that can pave the way to a fossil-free, clean-energy future and enhance the resilience of those most vulnerable to climate harm — not lock in reliance on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture or subsidize false solutions. Finally, climate finance must be designed and implemented through a rights-based approach that prioritizes transparency, public participation, and accountability. The report focuses primarily on this last element, drawing lessons from experience to date to inform a broader discussion about the fundamental contours of climate finance: what is funded, where, how much, and on what terms.
Read the full, designed report here.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
Background on Climate Finance
International Commitments to Climate Finance
International Human Rights Obligations Related to Climate Finance
Key Elements for Ensuring Rights-Compatible Climate Finance
Up to the Challenge: Ambitious Climate Finance
Reaching Those in Need: Equitable Climate Finance
No New Debt: Fair Climate Finance
Investing in Proven Mitigation and Adaptation Measures: Effective Climate Finance
For People and the Planet: Rights-Based Climate Finance
Essential Questions to Ask in Undertaking Climate Finance
Conclusion
Published March 2021