Afterward, large rich nations agreed to bump up their offer from a $250 billion proposal that the summit’s hosts had floated on Friday.
Still, a minimum of $300 billion is far below the trillions of dollars that poorer and vulnerable countries will need to withstand ever-rising seas and worsening storms, droughts and floods, several analyses have found. Other ways exist to raise those funds — such as private capital, and carbon credit trading whose rules also reached a final deal Saturday. But representatives of poor and vulnerable countries such as Malawi, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives said the sum was simply insufficient to meet their needs.
The financial agreement also comes with a pile of uncertainty about the final amount any rich country would pay — especially as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who calls climate change a hoax, prepares to take power in Washington. The EU, already by far the largest donor bloc, expects to have to shoulder more of the burden as U.S. participation recedes.
The deal was broadly in line with the expectations set by a U.N. report last week, which estimated the amount of public finance and related cash transfers needed to protect climate-threatened countries and finance their clean industries. It also largely meshed with the $200 billion to $300 billion in annual funding that EU nations had discussed in private, as POLITICO reported on Monday.
In the lead-up to the talks, the U.S. and the EU pressured China and other wealthy, but technically developing, countries to join them as a donor nation.
The deal opened up the possibility for developing nations such as China to contribute, or not, on a voluntary basis — potentially allowing both sides to claim a win.
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