The Biden administration called on China on Saturday to do more to help developing countries combat climate change, urging the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases to back international climate finance funds that it has so far declined to support.
Treasury secretary Janet L. Yellen delivered the message during her second day of meetings in Beijing, where she is seeking to cultivate areas of cooperation between the US and China. While China has expressed support for programs to help poor countries cope with the effects of climate change, it has resisted paying into such funds, arguing that it is also a developing nation.
Yellen said that China and the US share a common interest in climate change.
“Climate finance should be targeted efficiently and effectively,” Yellen said during a meeting with a group of Chinese and international sustainable finance experts on Saturday morning. “I believe that if China were to support existing multilateral climate institutions like the Green Climate Fund and the Climate Investment Funds alongside us and other donor governments, we could have a greater impact than we do today.”
The US and China are both facing pressure from developing countries to mobilise more money for such countries struggling to shut down coal plants, develop renewable energy, or cope with the consequences of climate change by building things like sea walls, improving drainage or developing early warning systems for floods and cyclones.
Under President Barack Obama, the US pledged $3 billion over four years to the Green Climate Fund, a UN-led programme aimed at helping poor countries. So far it has delivered $2 billion of that pledge. Republicans have sought several times to block taxpayer spending for the fund and other climate finance, but President Joe Biden has used discretionary spending within the state department to fulfil part of the US pledge.
China pledged $3.1 billion, and it has delivered about 10 per cent of that, according to studies. It also gives money to developing nations through what its leaders call “South-South” cooperation.
That’s because, under the UN climate body, China is still considered a developing country and not an industrialised nation, although China now has a far larger manufacturing sector than any other country.
New York Times News Service
