Climate support will be an important element in reaching a post-2020 climate agreement at COP 21 in December 2015. To further increase and mobilise the levels of climate support post-2020, a number of proposals have been made in the negotiating text produced in the Geneva session of the Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in February 2015.
This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of several of these proposals, focusing on those that are clear and specific. The paper assesses proposals on mobilising climate finance using the following criteria: (i) the level of financial flows that they could generate; (ii) how much of this could be mobilised in the UNFCCC context; (iii) the ease of implementation of the proposal; (iv) if and how such increased mobilisation could be monitored; and (v) whether the proposal would fill a specific gap in the context of climate support within the UNFCCC. The paper undertakes a similar assessment for proposals in the Geneva text on enhancing the level of technology development and transfer, as well as capacity building. It discusses whether the proposals could potentially increase technology development and transfer, capacity building and development, as well as whether they are likely to do so in practice, based on current experience and ease of implementation. The proposals vary significantly in the amount of climate support they could mobilise (or enhance, in the case of technology and capacity building), for a range of reasons. These include the particular wording of the proposals, their sensitivity to national implementation, uncertainty in measuring progress towards objectives, and in some cases the limited role the UNFCCC plays as an institution in a given area of climate support.
