(UN Environment Program, Baku, 4 December 2024) COP29 held in Baku, Azerbaijan, offered an important opportunity for governments and other global stakeholders to put in place the mechanisms, tools and signals required for countries to continue implementing their contributions to the Paris Agreement as urgently needed. The main areas of negotiation were on:
- the design & key elements of future climate financial architecture & the next collective quantified goal (NCQG) on climate finance;
- the rulebook for future international, compliance carbon markets; and
- countries’ collective signaling on mitigation ambition, as follow up to the various energy transition objectives captured in last year’s COP28 ’UAE Consensus’.
As widely reported elsewhere, while opportunities were missed to create the required clarity and determination on finance and ambition, there was some good news, even a breakthrough, on the establishment of government-backed, international carbon markets of the future. This summary highlights the recent, impressive achievements of the UNEP FI-convened net-zero groups, progress on financing climate adaptation, and the implications for financial institutions of some of the summit’s outcomes.
(Price of Oil, Washington, 11 July 2023) Italy’s export credit agency SACE has approved a $500 million guarantee in loans for the Talara oil refinery in Peru, once again breaking their commitment to end their international public finance for fossil fuels by the end of 2022. SACE is the biggest public financier of fossil fuels in Europe. Between 2016 and 2021, SACE supported EUR 13.7 billion in fossil fuels. A study by Oil Change International last year revealed that SACE is considering financing for international fossil fuel projects with emissions equivalent to more than 3 times Italy’s entire annual emissions. At the UN COP26 climate summit in 2021, 39 countries and financial institutions, including Italy, signed the Glasgow Statement, committing signatories to end their direct international public financing for fossil fuels by the end of 2022. Oil Change International’s Public Finance for Energy Database shows that G20 countries and the major multilateral development banks (MDBs) provided at least USD 63 billion per year in international public finance for oil, gas, and coal projects between 2018 and 2020. This is 2.5 more than their support for renewable energy.
(Oil Change International, Washington, 1 November 2022) OCI’s new report “At a Crossroads: Assessing G20 and MDB international energy finance ahead of stop funding fossils pledge deadline” looks at G20 country and MDB traceable international public finance for fossil fuels from 2019-2021 and finds they are still backing at least USD 55 billion per year in oil, gas, and coal projects. This is a 35% drop compared to previous years (2016-2018), but still, almost twice the support provided for clean energy, which averaged only $29 billion per year. ECAs were the worst public finance actors, providing seven times more support for fossil fuels than clean energy – at least $34 billion per year for fossil fuels and just $4.7 billion for clean energy. The report analyzes finance from OCI’s open-access database, and Public Finance for Energy’s Database (energyfinance.org), which have been updated alongside the release of this report. It tracks financial flows to fossil fuels and clean energy from G20 bilateral development finance institutions (DFIs), export finance agencies (ECAs), and the multilateral development banks (MDBs). The report from OCI and Friends of the Earth US has been endorsed by a long list of international civil society organizations.
(Reuters, Washington, 30 June 2021) The Export-Import Bank of the United States said on Wednesday it remained far behind its global competitors in financing volume in 2020 even as overall financing activity fell due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In its annual competition report here to Congress, EXIM said it authorized $1.8 billion in official medium- and long-term export credit support during calendar 2020, compared with global leader China at $18 billion, France at $12.1 billion, Germany at $8.6 billion and South Korea at $5 billion. China, traditionally the largest provider of export credit, saw its financing volume decrease last year from over $33 billion in 2019.
(Human Rights Watch, New York, 7 June 2021) Government financial support for fossil fuels, including through subsidies, presents a key obstacle to achieving emissions reductions urgently needed to address the climate crisis. Subsidies artificially reduce the costs of fossil fuel production and use, driving continued fossil fuel dependence at a time when governments should be rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels toward clean, renewable energies like wind and solar. Human Rights Watch has documented how climate change in Canada is depleting Indigenous peoples’ access to traditional food sources and in Colombia, showed how more frequent droughts are worsening malnutrition among Indigenous children. In the US, extreme heat is linked to adverse birth outcomes. These are only a few of the growing impacts experienced around the world that are expected to intensify as temperatures continue to rise in coming years. As of 2019, G20 governments, representing the world’s major economies, supported coal, oil, and gas production and consumption by, on average, $548 billion per year. A significant disparity in support also exists in international public finance, such as from export credit agencies. G20 countries provided at least $77 billion a year through their international public finance institutions.
(Urgewald & Reclaim Finance, Berlin, 24 February 2021) urgewald, Reclaim Finance, Rainforest Action Network, 350.org Japan and 25 further NGO partners have published groundbreaking research on the financiers and investors behind the global coal industry. It was found that in January 2021, 4,488 institutional investors held investments totaling USD 1.03 trillion in companies operating along the thermal coal value chain. The top commercial bank lenders to the coal industry are Mizuho, SMBC, MUFG, Citigroup and Barclays. Scandinavian banks poured $67 billion into the fossil fuel industry since Paris. The Rainforest Action Network notes that while “welcom(ing) President Biden’s Executive Order to end public financing for fossil fuels abroad, the new administration must also address the role of Wall Street as a huge driver of climate pollution around the world – driving us ever deeper into a climate crisis”.
(TFX News, New York, 3 February 2021) The OECD Consensus has a long history but it’s still the only game in town. With the International Working Group now in stasis, is that a problem, or is it going to focus minds on reform? The ‘Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits’ started out in 1978 building on the export credit ‘Consensus’ among a number of OECD countries in 1976 as a way of getting the world’s major exporting nations, in those days, the OECD countries, to agree on a level playing field for fair competition and, in the process, to rein in the huge export finance subsidies which were beginning to seem unsustainable even to the richest of them. The biggest pressures have been coming from outside the Consensus’s OECD core. Countries once indisputably not rich (e.g. China, India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa) moved from being exporters of primary goods and importers of capital goods to the opposite. Not all, but the size of the emerging exporting nations (China the biggest of them all) meant that their non-adherence to the OECD’s Consensus club created a need for a new forum. The International Working Group on Export Credits (IWG), was established in 2012 with the aim of trying to bridge the gap between them and the Consensus Participants. In November 2020, IWG technical groups were formally suspended for a year by 11 of the 18 countries (including the EU) due to the [Covid] freeze on IWG technical work. A new Secretary General has neither been so far agreed nor announced. The Arrangement has long had Sector Understandings, mini-‘Gentlemen’s Agreements’. At the moment, they cover aircraft, ships and trains plus energy and the environment (nuclear power, renewable energy, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and water projects, and coal-fired electricity). Time for new thinking is ahead. Like coral reefs, [10,000 years in development, quickly destroyed], the Arrangement is delicate, subject to abuse, but very valuable in parts to the world economy.
(International Chamber of Commerce, Paris, 9 November 2020) An advisory group to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has issued a call for G20 leaders to take action to avert the risk of widespread insolvencies amongst small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) globally, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, urging them to make coordinated interventions to increase the availability of trade-related finance to SMEs. Trade finance underpins somewhere between 80 – 90% of global trade and acts as a vital source of working capital for many SMEs. Recent signals suggest that [private] supply of trade credit to SMEs and emerging markets is at significant risk in response to growing corporate, sovereign and currency risks. ICC has further outlined additional measures that could be implemented by G20 governments to prime the supply of trade financing globally – including a scaling of publicly backed credit guarantee schemes, regulatory interventions and export credit insurance to incentivize the provision of trade credit by commercial banks. As noted in our May 2020 What’s New, the ICC has said that as much as US$5 trillion of trade credit will be needed to return trade volumes back to 2019 levels in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis in order to enable volumes and demand return to the global economy.
(Common Dreams, Portland, 6 July 2020) In an open letter to Emmanuel Macron and Rémy Rioux Common Dreams notes that France is embarking on an important diplomatic effort this November, bringing together 450 global development banks that control $2 trillion in public money. The objective? For public funders to declare that their contribution to the economic recovery from COVID-19 will support climate, sustainable development, and biodiversity goals. However, vague commitments to goals already agreed by governments worldwide will not be sufficient to make the “Finance in Common Summit” a success. The world needs concrete action. G20 governments provide over $77 billion in public finance for fossil fuel projects each year. For example, Canada, the second-largest financier of fossil fuels in the G20 (per capita, it’s the highest), has given government-backed EDC a major role in the COVID-19 response through two major financing programs that specifically prioritise the fossil fuel industry, without clarity on a financial ceiling for these programs. And while the UK government is allegedly working on a policy to exclude oil and gas from ECA financing, the Prime Minister’s office last week agreed to put UKEF money into an LNG terminal in Mozambique, spearheaded by France’s Total. This clearly undermines the UK’s efforts to position itself as a climate leader in the lead up to COP26.
(Friends of the Earch, Washington, 28 May 2020) Right after the mostly-rich and powerful G2O countries signed the Paris Agreement with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, they went home and continued with the business-as-usual public finance policies that directly undermined this goal. The world’s largest commercial banks are financing almost US$700 billion a year for oil, gas, and coal, with US$77 billion coming from public finance for fossil fuels, of which US$40 billion comes from ECAs, vs only US$2.9 billion from ECAs for clean energy… The G20 export credit agencies (ECAs), development finance institutions (DFIs), and the multilateral development banks (MDBs) FOE was able to track in its new report are still only a small fraction of all public finance for energy. Worldwide, 693 public banks own assets worth $38 trillion, and there is an overall estimated $73 trillion in public finance assets when central banks, sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and multilateral banks are also included. This also does not include direct subsidies through fiscal and tax measures that governments provide — for the G20 this support for fossil fuels is estimated at $80 billion a year. But as G20 governments prepare historic levels of public finance in response to COVID-19 we need them to break from the past and make sure this money goes to a just and sustainable recovery. For example, Spain has (alongside other promising measures from a wealth tax to an end to any new licenses for oil and gas) mandated their State and public institutions to divest from any holdings in companies whose activities include the extraction, refining and processing of fossil fuels.
