MADRID, Jan 16 (IPS) – It is no longer a secret that at major global summits there are more lobbyists than official delegates. There, they participate as ‘guests,’ and most of them work for big business corporations. Their goal? To deter the adoption of policies that conflict with their employers’ interests.
Their persuasion exercise quite often helps water down the urgency of taking decisive actions, the need to cut the private business staggering profits, the financial dues of the industrialised powers to the impoverished nations that bear the heaviest brunt of their policies, and so on.
To achieve such a purpose, lobbyists often quietly show different sorts of ‘gratitude.’
The Big Financial Gap in Climate Action
A clear evidence is what the global movement working in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption: Transparency International (TI) informs on the occasion of the International Anti-Corruption Day 2024: Time to tackle the murky world of climate negotiations:
“Every year billions of dollars are mobilised to finance initiatives that curb emissions, fund climate adaptation, and protect crucial conservation areas…
… But without strong anti-corruption measures in place, these essential resources are at risk of being diverted, and the current finance gap is at risk of never being closed.”
“We can already see evidence of this taking place.”
In the carbon credits market, it explains, where the inherent tension between reducing emissions and providing financial returns has led to land grabbing, bribery, projects being double-counted and the prices of carbon credits being keptsecret.
“Last year we saw that in total over 90 percent of carbon credits should not have been approved.”
Estimates of total global anonymous and potentially illicit wealth range from US$7 trillion to US$32 trillion (around 10% of total global wealth).
Such an amount is more than 100-fold the 300 billion US dollars promised by the world’s major climate carnage promoters in the concept of “reparation” to the most impacted poor countries.
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