Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
4/17/2015
The World Bank Group, the Agence Française de Développment and roughly two dozen additional large development financial institutions have agreed to better track financial commitments for carbon capture and storage development as part of efforts to better monitor financial commitments aimed at mitigating climate change. The development banks agreed earlier this month on a common set of principles on tracking commitments related to mitigating climate change in an effort to better monitor how funding is distributed and used. “Common methodologies will build trust that climate finance is flowing," World Bank Group Vice President and Special Envoy for Climate Change Rachel Kyte said in a release. "Our ability as multilateral, national and bilateral development institutions to tell a shared story will provide an essential piece of the climate finance jigsaw puzzle.”
According to the World Bank, the new guidelines are necessary because “the development finance institutions have been tracking climate finance for only a few years, and their methods have varied, making global public finance numbers difficult to compare. Some methods left out segments; others led to double counting of resources.” The new principals set “common definitions and guidelines” for tracking climate finance, but “leave the implementation, reporting, and quality control to each institution,” according to a World Bank release. Along with CCS, other activities that can be counted as climate finance include renewable energy; lower-carbon and efficient energy generation; energy efficiency; agriculture, forestry and land-use; water and wastewater; transportation; low-carbon technologies; and cross-cutting issues such as support for the development of carbon markets, policies and regulations, and emissions monitoring systems.
