Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Wisconsin International Law Journal
Abstract
Developed countries have committed to the largest sustained international transfer of wealth in history: an additional $100 billion per year of foreign assistance continuing in perpetuity under the Copenhagen Accord to deal with global warming in developing countries. A legal microscope has been focused by various international parties to scrutinize these funds. These trillions of dollars of international finance must be applied correctly, or the entire globe warms, and humanity suffers.
Developing countries demand that these funds be administered through new organizations with control by recipient, rather than donor, nations, with fewer administrative requirements and monitoring of recipient expenditure decisions. These critical international structural decisions map the future of evolving twenty-first century international law and regulation.
Yet the conflict over the appropriate institutional mechanism to facilitate and manage these immense public and private capital flows is being addressed now as if it were a conventional struggle over generic foreign aid. An examination proves that it is clearly much more. The future environment of the entire world is dependent on dozens of countries making the correct significant GHG emissions reductions; the failure of any one country imposes irreversible magnified burdens on all. There is now truly a global metric.
Successful investment by all countries must be accomplished immediately. Chief NASA climatologist James Hansen gives the world less than a decade to significantly slow or halt the increase of greenhouse gas emissions to inhibit irreversible climate change. Hansen notes that merely waiting until 2018 to stop the growth of GHG emissions may make it impossible to avoid catastrophic effects of warming. If these financial transfers, the funding engine for arresting climate change, are misapplied, the entire world bears the burden of global warming.
This article takes on the legal issues in dispute and examines how countries will sculpt the new post-Copenhagen/post-Cancun international structure for climate governance for this century:
· Analyzing financial commitments under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and normalizing data yields an unexpected comparative result for different developed and developing countries.
· Examining the regulatory advantages and disadvantages of two primary international organizational options, bitterly championed or opposed by donor and recipient nations, respectively, for administering this unprecedented new inflow of international funds.
· Comparing in detail the governance options of each of the international agencies and multilateral development banks to effectively administer the new climate fund.
· Ultimately, identifying the “true north” for international organizations to align and administer climate funds given scientific and policy imperatives.
To implement global warming control, massive transfer of financial resources between developed and developing countries has been already committed, by developed countries in the most recent Conference of the Parties in Durban in December 2011. The metric for international governance and structure for climate control is different when examined under the microscope. The urgency of this issue, its magnitude, and its irreversibility, require that international law get this right from the start. This is not an issue on which there is time to experiment or delay at the cost of the Planet.
First Page
26
Last Page
111
Publication Date
4-2012
Recommended Citation
Steven Ferrey, Changing Venue of International Governance and Finance: Exercising Legal Control Over the $100 Billion Per Year Climate Fund?, 30 Wis. Int'l L. J. 26 (2012).
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License