We must do everything we can to meet our moral obligations to the world’s poorest people who have done least to create climate change but who stand to suffer first and worst.

Our Obligations

The UK must provide funds for adaptation, mitigation and low carbon development in poor countries. Aside from helping to build a global low carbon economy (which is in all our interests), such funding should be seen as compensation owed for the damage we are causing to some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. This follows the established ‘polluter pays’ principle; and committing to providing such funding would demonstrate good faith on the part of the UK ahead of the international climate talks at Copenhagen.

North-South Resource Transfer

The specific actions we call on the UK Government to take are to:

• Provide our fair share of the resources that poor countries require to adapt to climate change, and to help them follow a low carbon development path.. Total funding from industrialised countries should be at least €110 billion ($160 billion) p.a. by 2020 of which at least €40-65 billion ($60-94 billion) should be for adaptation. The UK must help build a commitment from industrialised countries to deliver these resources which must be on top of the funds required to meet the existing internationally agreed aid target for donor countries (0.7% of GDP). Accordingly, new sources for raising these funds must be found (e.g. using revenues from the auctioning of EU ETS permits and/or international taxes on bunker fuels).
• The UK’s fair share of this total funding is around €4-5 billion ($6-7 billion) p.a. out of a total EU share of at least €35 billion ($50 billion) p.a. The UK must commit to providing this finance and work towards the EU as a whole meeting its share.
• Support the creation of an international framework which ensures that the above resource streams from industrialised to poorer countries (whether for adaptation, low carbon development or mitigation) are secure, equitable and predictable. This framework - which should have a governance structure that is fair, representative and transparent - should ensure that recipient countries control how these resources are used to address climate change and that finance is accessible to the poorest and most vulnerable countries and communities. It must also promote action to protect women, as some of the world's poorest citizens, and support their role in tackling climate change.