Meio Ambiente

Parties to the United Nations Climate Change Convention announced on April 15 the selection of a 40-member committee tasked with designing an international fund to manage resources mobilized to enable developing countries to address the effects of climate change.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said the transitional committee will prepare operational specifications for the Green Climate Fund in time for approval by the next UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa, in December.

"The high level of interest among governments in contributing to the design process is a demonstration of the great interest among parties in the Green Climate Fund", said Christiana Figueres, the UNFCCC Executive Secretary. "Parties have put forward experienced and respected individuals from the fields of finance and climate change", she said.

"The transparent, predictable and adequate provision of finance in the long term is essential to ensure that the poor and vulnerable can build themselves a sustainable future in the face of climate change", she added.

The transitional committee will have its first meeting in Mexico City on 28 April.

The Green Fund is being launched in the broad context of long-term financial support agreed last year at the UN climate change conference in Cancún, Mexico, under which industrialized countries committed to a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion per year by 2020.

The funds would be raised from both public and private sources and directly linked to meaningful climate change mitigation actions and transparency on implementation.

The Cancún Agreements are a set of decisions by the international community to address the long-term challenge of climate change collectively and comprehensively over time and to take concrete action to speed up global response.

The Green Climate Fund was only one of several new institutions agreed at Cancún. The others are a technology mechanism to get clean technologies to the right places and an adaptation framework to boost international cooperation to help developing countries protect themselves from the impacts of climate change.

Source: UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/news