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China asks rich nations to commit to $100bn climate fund
November 5, 2013, 5:16 am

A Board Meeting of the UN Green Climate Fund in Paris last month disappointed developing countries by failing to agree on a concrete date for donor pledges [Getty Images]

A Board Meeting of the UN Green Climate Fund in Paris last month disappointed developing countries by failing to agree on a concrete date for donor pledges [Getty Images]

A senior Chinese official on Tuesday urged developed countries to keep their commitments on climate financing.

“Developed countries should inject funds into the Green Climate Fund as soon as possible to ensure developing countries receive financial support’, said Xie Zhenhua, deputy head of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, at a press conference in Beijing.

At the COP15 meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries promised to mobilise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020 in order to address climate change.

A Board Meeting of the UN Green Climate Fund in Paris last month disappointed developing countries by failing to agree on a concrete date for donor pledges.

The Fund aims to help vulnerable developing nations adapt to more extreme weather and rising seas in a warmer world, and to put their economies on a low-emission path.

Developing countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts because people here depend on the natural environment for their income, food and water and may lack the capacity to respond to climate and weather-related disasters such as floods and droughts.

Unabated, climate change could have a major impact on critical infrastructure in developing countries.

Drought-prone areas will become drier and wet tropical regions wetter, says a new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Oxfam has also predicted that world hunger would worsen as climate change inevitably hurt crop production and disrupted incomes.

With inputs from Agencies