The Biden administration announced a $1 billion contribution to the Green Climate Fund this morning. This contribution, the first since the Obama administration’s initial $1 billion contribution, moves the U.S. closer to meeting its 2014 pledge of $3 billion. The GCF is entering its second replenishment period this fall, and the US failed to make a new pledge during the first replenishment.
Niranjali Amerasinghe, Executive Director of ActionAid USA, said:
This long-awaited and long-promised contribution to the Green Climate Fund is a crucial step in meeting U.S. climate finance obligations. The lack of contributions to this point has badly damaged U.S. credibility on the global stage. We urge both the Biden Administration and Congress to work to fulfill the entire US pledge from 2014 and make a robust new pledge for the GCF’s second replenishment period.
As the largest multilateral fund for climate finance, the Green Climate Fund is key to unlocking global climate action. Its democratic governance and accountability are crucial to just, effective and sustainable implementation of projects on the ground. The success of the Paris Agreement – and of global climate action more broadly – is tied to the success of the Green Climate Fund.
Climate finance is both a moral and practical necessity for equitable and just climate action. The unacceptably slow pace of the flow of climate finance has been a drag on climate action that frontline communities, and the world, cannot afford. The Biden administration’s $1 billion contribution to the GCF is a small but important step towards the accelerated flows of climate finance that we desperately need.
ENDS
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About ActionAid
ActionAid is a global federation working with more than 15 million people living in more than 40 of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, fair, and sustainable world in which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty.