Financing transition in an adverse context: climate finance beyond carbon finance

The Cancun conference decided to establish a Climate Green Fund (CGF) to help developing countries align their development policies with the long-term UNFCCC objectives. This paper clarifies the links between the two underlying motives: the first, technical in nature, is the necessity to redirect the infrastructure instruments in these countries (energy, transportation, building, material transformation industry) to avoid lock-in in carbon-intensive pathways in the likely absence of a significant world carbon price in the coming decade; the second, political in nature, is the interpretation of the CGF as a practical translation of the notion of the common but differentiated responsibility principle, since the funds are expected to come from Annex 1 countries. This paper shows why this latter perspective might generate some distrust given the orders of magnitude of funds to be levied in Annex 1 countries especially in the context of the financial crisis and major constraints on public budgets. It then explores the basic principles around which it is possible to minimize these risks by upgrading climate finance in the broader context of the evolution of the financial and monetary systems. After exploring how such links could help make climate policies that contribute to reducing some of the imbalances caused by economic globalization by reorienting world savings and reducing investment uncertainty, it sketches how this perspective might be palatable for the OECD, the major emerging economies and fossil fuel exporters. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.