Ireland on track to meet €225 million climate finance target by 2025 - Eamon Ryan

IRELAND IS ON track to meet a target for international climate finance of €225 million by 2025, Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan has said.

However, the figure is still well below the amount that would represent Ireland’s fair share of contributions globally, according to analysis by development charities.

Eamon Ryan was delivering Ireland’s national statement at COP29 in Azerbaijan, a major UN conference where negotiations are underway to try to strike important decisions about global climate action.

“Climate change is not something that happens in the future somewhere over there. It is here right now, and it is already impacting on all of our lives, in particular the lives of the most vulnerable in the poorest countries in the world who have had the least responsibility for harmful emissions,” Ryan said.

Addressing a plenary hall of climate and energy ministers from other countries around the world, he said: “Ireland is not immune to climate change. Our small island is becoming warmer and wetter.”

We see increased rainfall and flooding, affecting our towns, villages and farmland. Marine heatwaves threaten our biodiversity, and higher sea-levels and increased coastal storms lead to further erosion of our coastlines.

“While this is happening off our own shores, we are witnessing the devastating loss of life, livelihoods and nature, being caused by the opposite impact of climate change – extreme heat, wildfires, tropical storms and flooding,” the minister said. 

“Access to quality, reliable and accessible finance needs to be ensured, especially for the least developed countries and the small island developing states. That is why at COP26, Ireland committed to providing €225 million in climate finance by 2025, more than doubling our climate finance provided since 2020, and we will achieve this target on schedule,” he said. 

In 2021, then-Taoiseach Micheál Martin committed to providing at least €225 million in climate finance to developing countries annually by 2025. However, that target was criticised at the time for falling short of Ireland’s fair share of global responsibility.

Analysis in 2019 by Trócaire and Christian Aid Ireland said Ireland’s fair share contribution to a global climate finance target of $100 billion a year would be more than $500 million per year.

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The global target of $100 billion a year was set all the way back in 2009 – but now, as the climate crisis worsens and its impacts are becoming acutely clear, countries are negotiating a deal this week at COP29 for a much larger target.

Helping developing countries to fight climate change, both for their own sake and the rest of the world’s, will require ramping up international finance to $1 trillion a year.

There is broad agreement in the negotiations about the amount of finance needed but the nature of the funding and who exactly is providing it are the main sticking points. 

A draft negotiating text still contains various options that countries must form some agreement on before a final text can be secured.

The first option is for a “provision and mobilisation goal” that would say it is the “sole obligation of developed countries to provide and mobilise climate finance to developing countries” and that “all developing countries” can access the finance.

The second option is for a “multi-layer approach, including investment, provision and mobilisation” which would be made up of both public finance from developed countries but also private finance sources. This option is preferred by developed countries but is not favoured by most developing countries or climate activists, who say that relying on private finance or loans to make up the target would ultimately create more problems. 

A third option looks at the potential for having “option 1 and 2 expressed as a cumulative goal or in combination with a cumulative goal over the time frame”.

Each of the options in the draft text still has multiple ‘sub-options’ up for discussion. In total, across the 25-page document, there are 43 various options and 415 pieces of text in ‘brackets’ – reflecting the volume of work that still has to be done to bring it down to a consolidated text that ministers. 

Eamon Ryan supports increasing the share of public finance directed to climate adaptation but also said that there should be as “much money as possible flowing to where it is needed the most and other sources of finance are vital to this”, calling for a “mosaic of solutions – including private, philanthropic, domestic and innovative sources”.

Many experts and activists, however, fear that relying on private finance sources would jeopardise the effectiveness of any climate finance target, especially if it integrates loans that risk putting developing countries under even worse debt burdens than many of them already are.

Instead, they argue that developed countries should divert funding away from fossil fuel subsidies and use that revenue to help developing countries take climate action instead – a move that would cut off funding flows to the source of the problem and help those most in need to tackle it.

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