The Diplomat
The Council of Ministers yesterday approved Spain’s participation in the second replenishment of the Green Climate Fund, with a first contribution of 73 million euros for the 2023 fiscal year.
Spain’s participation in the second replenishment of the Green Climate Fund was announced last September 20 by the acting President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, during his speech at the Climate Ambition Summit, convened by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, at the United Nations headquarters in New York and within the framework of the High Level Week and the beginning of the 78th session of the General Assembly.
Specifically, Pedro Sánchez announced that Spain will allocate 262 million euros to finance the countries’ fight against climate change, broken down into 225 million for the second replenishment of the Green Climate Fund, 20 million for the Adaptation Fund and 17 million to finance the so-called Climate Justice (aimed at the most vulnerable and mitigating losses and damages).
The second replenishment of the Green Climate Fund corresponds to the period from January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2027. The 225 million euros committed by Sánchez correspond to the total of these four years and the 73 million euros authorized yesterday are limited to the 2023 financial year, with a view to the start of the new phase.
In the first replenishment of the Green Climate Fund, the contribution approved by the Council of Ministers in October 2019 (when there was also a Government in office, after the June elections and a month before the new elections in November) was 150 million euros for the period 2019-2023.
The Green Climate Fund, created in 2010 during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, is the financial mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its objective is to contribute to the achievement of the international community’s climate change mitigation and adaptation goals. The UN’s objective is to make this instrument the main multilateral financing mechanism to support climate action in developing countries, with African and Southern Hemisphere island states as preferred targets.
The Green Climate Fund is financed through contributions from member countries, which can be either in cash or in kind. In addition, the Fund can also receive contributions from other sources, such as the private sector, non-governmental organizations and individual citizens.
Spain has belonged to this body since 2010 and has been present in the deliberations of the Green Climate Fund since its establishment. In the initial resource mobilization of November 2014, Spain pledged a contribution of €120 million. Likewise, in October 2019 it announced a contribution of 150 million euros.
