CANBERRA — The latest climate finance data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — supporting insights on climate financing from bilateral donors using official development assistance, or ODA — ends with the 2018 calendar year. Collating, cleaning, and confirming the data creates a lag in the results and a challenge in understanding whether donors are doing their part in responding to climate change.
Financially, Japan leads the way in climate funding, contributing $9.6 billion — and 53% of its bilateral development assistance — to programs targeting climate adaptation and mitigation in 2018. However, 94% of this funding was directed at programs where climate was a significant goal of the program and not a “principal” goal. This means the programs could have gone ahead even without a climate objective.
But the OECD data is just part of the story. While developing country profiles on climate funding for the Donor Tracker website, Raimund Zühr from SEEK Development told Devex that politics plays an important role.