Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator. I was very proud we were asked to do the job we are being asked to do on adaptation because as she says, it is central. It is the most important issue, especially for the most developing countries, because that is where they need the resources most immediately. Their definition of "adaptation" is much broader than what others might see. It is not just a flood defence, sea wall or a well and often crosses over into how to reduce emissions. Often it can be, and should be, centred on nature-based solutions, which means we are funding very locally. Our principles around that in Ireland are very well-understood and very progressive. Through cultural experience going back over the decades we have shown a real ability to listen locally and support local leadership in how financing might be spent and how it works. As I said, 80% of our climate finance funding goes to adaptation. It should also be recognised this State has absolutely delivered what we committed to. We have doubled our funding for climate finance. Next year it will be €225 million, as we promised. The climate finance in adaptation is 100% grant aid. There are no loans. We have a good story to tell which maybe helps us listen to what other people have to say.

The $115 billion is complicated because some of that was always going to be mobilised private finance. Going from memory, it might have been $95 billion in public finance. Some of that, as the Senator said, is in the form of loans, whereas Ireland does it as a grant. There was also a further $20 billion attached to it. It was always designed to have a combination, that is, the original NCQG was to have both mobilised private finance with public finance. As to the question of how I see the new NCQG, she is right there is differentiation between that and the much wider, bigger issue about where the overall financial flows need to go. However, it cannot be simplified right down to say it is just about how much the developed countries will give in public grant finance and everything else is a separate issue. I come back to work we were doing in the International Energy Agency this year, which I think I mentioned in my opening comments. Its assessment was $4.3 trillion per year needs to be invested per annum in the energy side alone. It assessed that beneath that, the developing countries other than China, which is already making its investment possible, need an investment of $1.5 trillion per annum for them to be part of this solution. I am going on memory for that figure.

When I talk to people in those countries, including the small island countries and less developed countries, especially the ones in Africa we tend to be close to, they insist it has to include private finance because one of their problems is they are completely frozen out of the markets. It is true they have debt problems and ones that were often made worse by what has happened during Covid and the war in Ukraine, and that debt must be addressed. The finance ministers meeting in Washington this week have a key role in that. That should not blind us and have us saying this is all just about public finance and we should not look to bring private finance in. What Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, said is it is not just that the pier has washed away three times but that countries like hers are paying three times the interest rate a developed country is paying. Thus, if we ignore that financing issue or do not avail of this opportunity in how we design the NCQG in a layered approach as the EU is arguing, we are doing a disservice to the most developing countries.

There is indeed going to have to be an increase in the scale of public financing and my argument is that it absolutely should not be tied, especially not if it is tied to resource extraction, as the Senator said, or any other geopolitical considerations. We are very much opposed to that and never apply it. One of the other benefits of Irish aid is it is not tied. There is debate on whether we should include our climate finances as part of our overseas development aid. I believe we should because it is central to development and to alleviating the worst poverty, so we would be mis-defining it, in a sense, if we did not see it as part of our overseas development aid, which needs to be increased. The exact level of the fund, or the exact mechanism here, will not be decided, I imagine, until the last few days of the climate negotiations. These typically go until the last minute. We have a challenge because when the NCQG was originally designed it was the leaders of government who came in at the last stage in Copenhagen and in a sense salvaged a COP that was heading towards disagreement by creating the NCQG. In this instance in Baku, the leaders will be coming in the early days. As to exactly how we reach agreement, I will be upfront in saying people have not had sight yet of how this can be landed, how we can get agreement, but we need to get agreement. The measure of our success should be how closely it lives up to this central purpose of the NCQG, namely, aligning development and climate action. That has to be in a variety of ways through Article 6, including, innovative sources of financing, public finance and mobilised private capital as well. That is what I hear African leaders, representatives of the small island states and the LDCs we tend to be close to saying to me.