Climate financing by the world’s six largest multilateral development banks (MDBs) rose to a seven-year high of $35.2 billion in 2017 – an increase of 28 per cent on the previous year. The sharp increase is said to have come in response to the ever more pressing challenge of climate change.

Calls to galvanise climate finance were at the heart of events such as the One Planet Summit in Paris in December 2017, two years after the historic Paris Climate Change Agreement was adopted.

Climate finance is crucial to enable developing countries green their economies and adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change.

The MDBs’ latest joint report on climate financing said $27.9 billion, or 79 per cent of the 2017 total, was devoted to climate mitigation projects that aim to reduce harmful emissions and slow down global warming in line with the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

“For the World Bank Group, 2017 was a record-setting year on climate finance as a result of a deliberate effort over the past few years to mainstream climate considerations into our operations. This upward trend is continuing,” said World Bank Senior Director for Climate Change John Roome.

“The Multilateral Development Banks are also playing a key role in leveraging private sector finance which will be critical to meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Last year alone, the WBG crowded in $8.6 billion in private financing for climate change, which is up 27% from 2016,” he added.

The remaining 21 per cent, or $7.4 billion, of financing for emerging and developing nations was invested in climate adaptation projects that help economies deal with the effects of climate change such as unusual levels of rain, worsening droughts and extreme weather events.

In 2016, climate financing from the MDBs had totalled $27.4 billion.

The latest MDB climate finance figures are detailed in the 2017 Joint Report on Multilateral Development Banks’ Climate Finance, combining data from the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank Group and the World Bank Group (World Bank, IFC and MIGA). These banks account for the vast majority of multilateral development finance.

In October 2017, the Islamic Development Bank joined the MDB climate finance tracking groups, and its climate finance figures will be included in joint reports from 2018 onwards.

Climate funds such as the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Trust Fund, the Global Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Fund (GEEREF), the European Union’s funds for Climate Action, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and others have also played an important role in boosting MDB climate finance. As well as the $35.2 billion of multilateral development finance, the same adaptation and mitigation projects attracted an additional $51.7 billion from other sources of financing last year.

Of the 2017 total, 81 per cent was provided as loans. Other types of financial instruments included policy-based lending, grants, guarantees, equity and lines of credit.

Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia and the Pacific were the three major developing regions receiving the funds. The report contains a breakdown of climate finance by country.

Multilateral banks began publishing their climate investment in developing countries and emerging economies jointly in 2011, and in 2015 MDBs and the International Development Finance Club agreed joint principles for tracking climate adaptation and mitigation finance.

Climate finance addresses the specific financial flows for climate change mitigation and adaptation activities. These activities contribute to make MDB finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development, in line with the Paris Agreement. The MDBs are currently working on the development of more specific approaches to reporting their activities and how they are aligned with the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

The Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) has predicted cloudy weather conditions over the central states of the country in the morning of Saturday, June 16, 2018.

NiMet’s Weather Outlook by its Central Forecast Office in Abuja on Friday also predicted possibilities of isolated thunderstorms over Ilorin, Bida and Mambilla Plateau during the period.

It predicted day and night temperatures in the range of 27 to 38 and 20 to 26 degrees celsius in the central states.

It added that parts of Niger, Nassarawa, Kaduna, Jos, Abuja, Lafia, Mambilla Plateau, Yola and Jalingo were expected to experience isolated thunderstorms during the afternoon and evening hours.

The agency predicted that the southern states would experience rains over places like Calabar, Port Harcourt, Warri and Eket during the morning hours.

It also predicted cases of isolated rain showers over the entire region in the afternoon and evening with day and night temperatures of 31 to 32 and 23 to 25 degrees celsius.

According to NiMet, Northern States will experience cloudy conditions over the north-eastern part of the country with possibilities of morning thunderstorms over Sokoto, Yelwa, Gusau, Katsina and Kano axis.

According to the forecast Maiduguri and Yelwa have likelihood of isolated thunderstorms later in the day with day and night temperatures in the range of 35 to 41 and 25 to 27 degrees celsius.

It also predicted that “thunderstorms and rains are likely within the country in the next 24 hours”.

By Sumaila Ogbaje

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) achieved carbon neutrality at its last plenary session in France, according to the organisation.

The 47th Session of the IPCC, held in Paris from March 13 to 16, 2018, is thus the first climate-neutral meeting of the UN scientific and intergovernmental body.

The IPCC worked with the Climate Neutral Now initiative of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to offset carbon emissions involved in participant travel to the meeting and arising from the meeting itself at the conference location.

“I would like to recognise the leadership and commitment of the Government of France, which enabled us to reach this important goal,” said IPCC Chair, Hoesung Lee. “The IPCC is walking the talk, and I hope that with the support of our members we can continue to be climate-neutral at future meetings.”

Nicolas Hulot, France’s Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition, welcomed the offset of emissions from the IPCC’s 47th Session.

“This is a first for a plenary session of the IPCC. I hope this will become standard usage for international events, and a priority for those interested in protecting the climate system,” said Mr Hulot. “Every opportunity must be seized to raise our awareness about the choices we make and their impacts on our future climate.”

A carbon offset is a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases made in order to compensate for (“offset”) an emission made elsewhere. The Climate Neutral Now platform works by compensating unavoidable emissions with credits in the Clean Development Mechanism, supporting projects in developing countries.

“By making use of our Climate Neutral Now initiative, the IPCC is demonstrating how this valuable tool can be practically deployed to help achieve the Paris Agreement climate action goals,” said Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC. “I hope many others will be inspired to do the same – including governments, organizations, companies and citizens, who all need to take climate action to safeguard the future of our planet.”

Travel to IPCC meetings for participants from developing countries and economies in transition supported by the IPCC Trust Fund has been offset since 2014 in line with the policies of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), which is one of the IPCC’s two parent organisations along with UN Environment, which manages the Trust Fund on behalf of the IPCC.

For the IPCC’s 47th Session, the French government covered the costs of offsetting travel by participants not supported by the Trust Fund, and offset other emissions from local travel and the meeting venue, the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Optimising economic welfare without constraints might put human well-being at risk, a new climate study argues.

While being successful in bringing down costs of greenhouse gas reductions for instance, the concept of profit maximisation alone does not suffice to avoid the tipping of critical elements in the Earth system which could lead to dramatic changes of our lifelihood.

The scientists use mathematical experiments to compare economic optimisation to the governance concepts of sustainability and the more recent approach of a safe operating space for humanity. All of these turn out to have their benefits and deficits, yet the profit-maximising approach shows the greatest likelihood of producing outcomes that harm people or the environment.

“We find that the concept of optimisation of economic welfare might in some cases be neither sustainable nor safe for governing modern environmental change,” says Wolfram Barfuss from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK, member of Leibniz Association) and Humboldt University Berlin, lead-author of the study published in Nature Communications.

He adds: “Economic optimisation can be quite effective in reducing current greenhouse-gas emissions; it certainly has its strengths. Yet under human-made global warming, we face a world full of complex non-linearities, namely the tipping elements in the Earth system. The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica might collapse at some point if greenhouse-gas emissions do not get reduced, or the great circulation systems in ocean and atmosphere could fundamentally change. In such a setting, optimisation can lead to dangerous side effects. Even for relatively high risks, and even if profit-maximising agents in our calculations are far-sighted, they tend to accept the possibility of detrimental environmental and societal impacts.”

Mathematical experiments, climate policy and Sustainable Development Goals

This is the result of mathematical experiments that the scientists performed. While governments worldwide agreed on ambitious targets such as the 17 UN Sustainability Goals and the Paris Agreement which aims at limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, there is no consensus on how to reach those targets. The scientists identified and then analysed three big concepts: economic optimisation (act to maximise your expected profit, with discounted future), sustainability (act to always stay above a minimum standard of expected profit, with discounted future), and the safe operating space approach, relying on the Planetary Boundaries concept (act to always stay within the safe space for humanity to ensure the functioning of the Earth’s life-supporting systems).

“Take the Atlantic Overturning Circulation, better known as the Gulf Stream System, one of the great potential tipping elements in the Earth system,” says co-author Jonathan Donges, from PIK and Stockholm Resilience Centre. “We know, both from our understanding of the physics and from observations, that it can be put at risk by global warming. But we cannot yet calculate the timing of a tipping as well as the potential damages arising from it.”

Hence it is clear that economic optimisation of climate policy would normally not be able to count it in as future costs.

“From the safe operating space perspective, we’d have to cut greenhouses gas emissions immediately to make sure the Gulf Stream does not get seriously disturbed,” says Donges. “But you cannot say that ‘safe’ is always ‘best’’; because, from a sustainability point of view, poverty reduction is one main goal. If we ended fossil fuel use too abruptly, the costs of a transition to clean energy would be substantial and might, at least for a certain time, rise energy and food prices and consequently impede the poverty reduction goal.”

“Neither economic thinking nor good will alone will suffice”

It hence depends on the circumstances whether a sustainable or safe approach is most suitable. The only thing clear is that in a no-policy scenario of unmitigated greenhouse-gas emissions, a Gulf Stream System collapse would also have negative impacts on poverty reduction.

“It turns out that there is no master concept for countering environmental challenges,” says co-author, Jürgen Kurths, head of the PIK research department ‘Transdisciplinary Concepts and Methods’ and a pioneer of the complex non-linear systems analysis applied here. “Yet our analysis is a first step to provide decision-makers with better insights on which concept for achieving the climate and sustainability targets work how and under which circumstances. Neither economic thinking nor good will alone suffice to deal with a world full of complex non-linear dynamics.”