In his first speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations since taking office, U.S. President Joe Biden drew a direct link between ending his country’s two-decade war in Afghanistan and addressing international challenges such as climate change.
“Instead of continuing to fight the wars of the past, we are fixing our eyes on devoting our resources to the challenges that hold the keys to our collective future,” Biden said.
He promised “a new era of relentless diplomacy” and of “using the power of our development aid to invest in new ways of lifting people up around the world.”
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To signal his administration’s commitment to helping lower-income countries deal with climate change, Biden announced the White House will work with the U.S. Congress to double the climate finance commitments his administration made in April. That would bring total U.S. climate finance to $11.4 billion per year by 2024.
“This will make the United States a leader in public climate finance. And with our added support, together with increased private capital and other — from other donors, we’ll be able to meet the goal of mobilizing $100 billion to support climate action in developing nations,” Biden said, referring to a 2009 commitment that is a bedrock of the Paris climate agreement.
The new White House pledge comes at a tenuous moment for international climate change negotiations, which fundamentally depend on maintaining trust between higher-income countries.
“The reality also is that developing countries who are least responsible for the crisis are the ones struggling the most to cope with the impacts and recover from the increasing frequency and intensity of these disasters,” said Harjeet Singh, senior adviser to Climate Action Network International, during a Devex event Tuesday coinciding with the General Assembly.
Especially critical is funding for climate change adaptation, which has lagged behind emissions reduction despite projections that adaptation costs could reach $500 billion per year by 2050.
“The discussion on that is still very difficult and contentious because everything boils down to money,” Singh said.
Public finance from high-income governments such as the U.S. will determine whether the overall target of $100 billion is met, said Rachel Kyte, dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University, during the Devex event. However, development finance institutions such as the World Bank and other multilateral development banks must rethink their spending to put climate change adaptation at the center, she said.
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“This is where we need to see … a quantum leap or a step change in the way that we think about adaptation,” Kyte said.
“It's not just about the numerical target. It is about making sure that all education lending, all health lending, all agricultural lending has this new reality built in,” she added.
In his speech, Biden argued that avoiding costly military engagements will free the U.S. government to tackle international challenges such as climate change and COVID-19 through diplomacy and development. In the eyes of some civil society advocates, the global responses to climate and the pandemic are inextricably linked, and the world is failing the spirit of cooperation on both fronts.
Earlier this month, Climate Action Network released a statement calling for the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference in Scotland to be postponed due to concerns that lower-income countries lack access to COVID-19 vaccines and might not be able to attend.
“If we think that climate change is a stand-alone crisis, we are fooling the world and we are ignoring the elephant in the room, which is the interconnected elements that have caused the problem in the first place — whether we talk about vaccine inequity or the climate crisis,” Singh said.