Nothing concrete agreed on increased NZ contribution to climate funding, says minister
Wednesday, 27 November 2024
The size of any increase in the climate-change funding New Zealand will provide to developing countries as a result of a new UN agreement has yet to be determined, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says.
Developed countries agreed at the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan on Sunday to triple the assistance they provide to developing countries to help them with their energy transition and mitigate the impact of climate change.
The “New Collective Quantified Goal” (NCQG) for climate finance should see them provide at least US$300 billion (NZ$517b) a year to developing countries by 2035.
That is an increase from the current $100b annual funding goal.
The funding is designed to reflect the fact that wealthier economies have contributed most to emissions and benefited most from the use of fossil fuels in the past.
The Taxpayers Union lobby group said on Monday that the Government would need to pay $500m a year to developed countries in NCQC contributions.
But Watts made clear that conclusion couldn’t yet be drawn.
The size of New Zealand’s contribution to the target would be determined by the Government and “no decisions had been made”, he said.
The Treasury made clear that was also the case for other countries that agreed to the COP29 plan.
“It is for individual developed countries to decide how they will respond to it and what the level of their contribution will be,” it said in a statement.
Watts said at the UN climate conference that New Zealand was committed to meeting its climate targets and “doing our part to reduce the impacts of climate change”.
The only costed new commitment he announced was an additional $10m contribution to the Global Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, which is geared at providing climate disaster aid to small island nations.
Salt Funds director Paul Harrison is among those who has voiced doubts over how United States President-elect Donald Trump will view the COP29 agreement after he is inaugurated in January.
New Zealand’s current NCQG commitment is to provide $1.3b in climate finance during the four-year period between 2022 and next year, the Treasury said.
It warned in the May Budget that no commitments had been built into its fiscal forecasts for contributions beyond then.
Any further funding that ran into the order of hundreds of millions of dollars would appear potentially be material in terms of shaping expectations of when the Government might return to surplus.
A spokesperson for Finance Minister Nicola Willis said Watts was responding to queries about the fiscal implications of the COP29 agreement.
The US$300b annual target agreed at COP29 wouldn’t necessarily all be provided in the form of government aid, the document agreed in Azerbaijan made clear.
The funding could come from “a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources”, the agreement said.