The former boss of the Bank of England has said getting money to developing economies will be vital in the fight against climate change.
Mark Carney, who is now a climate advisor to Boris Johnson, said investment commitments from the private financial sector “could be sufficient” for the scale needed in advanced economies.
“That doesn’t mean it’s job done by any stretch of the imagination because… the money has to be lent to the right people, they have to invest and they have to execute – lots of things have to happen,” he said.
“The challenge though is… what about the scale of the capital needed in the rest of the world, which is as big again as what’s required in the advanced economies. So that’s one of the big challenges that obviously we all have to face.”
Aid could also prove key to accelerating the fight against global warming.
At the Paris climate conference in 2015, developed nations committed to providing 100 billion dollars in climate aid every year by 2020.
However there is still around 21 billion dollars missing from those commitments. Mr Carney said that plugging this gap will be a criteria to measure if the Glasgow conference later this year is a success.
Mr Carney left the Bank last year, and is now the Prime Minister’s finance adviser for the Cop26 conference. He is also special envoy for climate action and finance at the United Nations.
The UK is gearing up to host the Cop summit in Glasgow in early November. The United Nations conference was originally meant to be held a year earlier.
Asked about the pandemic’s effect on his work, Mr Carney said “we’ve ramped up”.
“We have added ambition to our objectives. We are doing much more work on blended finance, for example, our ambitions for what the private sector should accomplish have increased,” he told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee.
“And we are pushing much more broadly, for example, on mandatory disclosures. So curiously, despite the challenges of working and the strains on everyone, I would say that certainly the pandemic has not impeded the results – if anything it has reinforced the results.”
