Isra-Mart srl:World Bank and UN debut new climate finance portal

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The World Bank and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) yesterday launched a new website designed to make it easier for developing countries to access the myriad of grants, funds and loans intended to support climate change projects.

Unveiled on the sidelines of the Cancun climate change summit, the new Climate Finance Options aims to make it easier for policymakers and entrepreneurs to navigate the growing number of different financing mechanisms that have emerged as industrialised nations attempt to make good on their pledge to provide $30bn of climate financing over the next three years.

"Accessing finance from the growing number of climate funds - all with different criteria and requirements - is a complex and time-consuming business for many developing countries," said Andrew Steer, World Bank Group special envoy for climate change, in a statement. "This website disentangles the spaghetti, providing user-friendly information that will help officials, NGOs and entrepreneurs to tap into finance with a minimum of fuss."

The new service came as the EU negotiating team in Cancun released a report detailing how it provided €2.2bn of extra climate aid in 2010 and is on track to deliver the €7.2bn the bloc promised to provide between 2010 and 2012 as part of the fast start finance commitments made in last year's Copenhagen Accord.

The report revealed that the total funding provided in 2010 will fall just shy of the €2.4bn that had been planned as a result of a shortfall from Italy. It also confirmed that 52 per cent of the funding was provided in the form of loans or equity investments with the remainder delivered as grants.

Artur Runge-Metzger, the head of the European Commission team in Cancun, defended the use of loans insisting that they were a more effective means of funding energy efficiency projects than grants.

"It is a revolving fund," he said. "You insulate your house and you save the money and then the fund can be lent to someone else."

However, some developing countries remain wary of climate funding initiatives that would require repayments and are demanding that the bulk of the money promised by industrialised nations should be provided as grants. Questions are also being asked about the extent to which the $30bn promised by industrialised nations represents additional funding or a repurposing of existing development budgets.