Oxfam accuses European politicians of repackaging budgets for climate change
ANTI-POVERTY campaign group Oxfam yesterday accused European politicians of planning to “cannibalise” existing development aid budgets and repackage them as part of a deal to fight climate change.
Oxfam said it had found evidence that exposed “undercover accounting” in some rich nations’ pledges to help poor nations to tackle the climate threat.
But Sweden, holder of the rotating European Union presidency, denied the charges made the day before a UN summit starts in Copenhagen on negotiating a new global deal to combat climate-warming emissions.
“What is new and additional money is not always clear cut, but many countries, my own included, have foreseen and planned for Copenhagen, and the money is already in state budgets,” said Sweden’s chief climate negotiator Anders Turesson.
Finance has emerged as one of the key obstacles in the talks to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the UN’s main tool for dealing with global warming. The agreement expires in 2012.
Developing nations want billions of dollars a year to help them adapt to a problem they say was initially caused by industrialised countries.
The EU says poor countries will need around €100bn (£90.2bn) a year by 2020, of which as much as half would come from the public purse globally.