Delivering just a fraction of the money promised by Joe Biden to help poorer nations adapt to worsening storms, floods and droughts have put the US on the brink of alienating developing countries hit hardest by the climate crisis.
The $1.7tn spending bill to keep the US government running, passed by the Senate on Thursday, includes less than $1bn in climate assistance for these countries despite the promise made by Biden that the US Government will give $11.4bn each year to developing countries to ease climate impacts and help them shift to renewable energy.
Expected to pass the House and be signed by the president, the bill includes $270m for adaptation programs, largely for countries in Asia and the Pacific islands, along with $260m in clean energy investment, aimed at Africa while another $185m will go on “sustainable landscapes programs”.
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Developing countries will need anything from $340bn to $2tn a year by 2030, according to various studies, to cope with the cascading impacts of global heating and the failure to so far meet Biden’s pledge risks undermining the White House’s insistence that the US is committed to helping deal with the fallout of a climate crisis that it is a leading instigator of, through its huge historical and ongoing greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmental groups in the US have welcomed elements of the spending bill, including a large increase in the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency and department of the interior, as well as $600m for water infrastructure in Jackson, Mississippi, but criticized the glaring lack of climate aid.
“Funding levels for international climate aid are woefully inadequate to meet our global commitments or do our fair share to support under-resourced countries bearing the brunt of climate impacts,” said Sara Chieffo, vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters.
Biden’s administration had made climate spending a priority, with John Kerry, the US’s climate envoy, dispatched to lobby lawmakers. Both Biden and Kerry attended the UN Cop27 climate talks in Egypt last month and vowed the US would step up its assistance. “The climate crisis is hitting hardest those countries and communities that have the fewest resources to respond and to recover,” Biden noted in his speech to delegates at the summit, repeating his promise to extract the required money from Congress.
Administration officials say the goal is to deliver the assistance by 2024 and that money could come from other sources than direct appropriations from Congress. But the likelihood of doing this becomes far more remote once Republicans, who have largely rejected the idea of providing further aid for climate damages, gain control of the House of Representatives in January.
A White House spokeswoman said that the $11bn target is “a top priority for us and critical to the success of president Biden’s climate agenda. And the president has made clear that he is going to fight to see this fully funded.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
