Developed nations made very little progress toward their goal of providing $100 billion a year to help poor countries tackle climate change. This may undermine climate talks at the UN COP26 in Glasgow, planned in a month.  

“There is no excuse: delivering on the $100 billion goal is a matter of trust,” Alok Sharma, COP26 president, said in response to the figures. “We have seen little progress and the OECD report shows clearly how much further is to go.”

Total climate finance provided by rich countries for developing nations was $79.6 billion in 2019, an increase of only 2% from 2018. It would require more that $20 billion to meet the funding goal. The rate of annual increases has only slowed over the past years (see the picture below).

OECD report finds that public climate finance from developed countries reached USD 62.9 billion in 2019. Bilateral public climate finance accounted for USD 28.8 billion, down 10% from 2018, and multilateral public climate finance attributed to developed countries accounted for USD 34.1 billion, up by 15% from 2018. The level of private climate finance mobilised was down 4% at USD 14.0 billion in 2019, after USD 14.6 billion in 2018. Climate-related export credits remained small at USD 2.6 billion, accounting for just 3% of total climate finance.

The report also shows that out of the overall climate finance in 2019, 25% went to adaptation (up from 21% in 2018), 64% went to climate change mitigation activities (down from 70% in 2019), and the remainder to crosscutting activities. More than half of total climate finance targeted economic infrastructure – mostly energy and transport – with most of the remainder going to agriculture and social infrastructure, notably water and sanitation.