The headline figure, of $27.9 billion, is close to the $30 billion of ‘fast-start’ climate financing that industrialised countries promised in last December’s Copenhagen Accord. 

However, researchers at the Washington, DC-based think-tank say that it is difficult to assess how much of the money is genuinely “new and additional”, and partly blame a lack of standardised reporting rules at the international level.

 “My general sense is that not a lot is additional money in the traditional sense of the word,” Athena Ballesteros, a senior associate at the WRI, told Environmental Finance. 

For example, while the Japanese government last December pledged around $15 billion via its Hatoyama Initiative, that pledge “resembles the previously announced Japanese Cool Earth Partnership”, which was worth around $10 billion the WRI says.

 Ballesteros said it is “impossible” to quantify the extent to which climate financing is additional, as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process “has not produced a set of reporting rules for financial commitments under the Convention”. 

“Countries are reporting in 12 different ways,” she added, noting that the issue was a point of convention at the latest round of climate talks, in Bonn earlier this month. 

She added that changes to how the WRI calculates the figure means it has slipped from $31.1 billion, reported in June, as a consequence of currency fluctuations, as the WRI has had to convert pledges made in domestic currencies into US dollars. 

The WRI is calling on governments to “begin the process of creating draft guidelines for reporting of financial information in a comparable, transparent, complete, accurate and efficient manner. 

“While implementing this common reporting format may take some time, in the interim Parties will need to increase the transparency of their fast-start finance in a coordinated way in order to demonstrate that they are delivering on their Copenhagen fast-start pledges,” it says. 

Mark Nicholls