World Must Prepare to Fight Climate Change Without US, UK Says

(Bloomberg) -- The world needs to prepare to fight global warming without the help of the US as the Trump administration pulls billions of dollars pledged to initiatives funding the green transition, the UK’s climate envoy said.

This week, South Africa said the US notified it about withdrawing from a coal-transition pact to which it had committed $1 billion. In January, Washington canceled $4 billion of pledges to the Green Climate Fund, the largest of its kind globally. The fate of billions of dollars pledged by the US to green shifts in Indonesia and Vietnam is unclear.

“You plan for the worst and hope for the best,” Rachel Kyte, the envoy, said in an interview in South Africa’s capital of Pretoria on Thursday. “We have to plan for a world where the US is not transfusing funds into the green transition.”

Since taking office on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump has disrupted the aid and development-finance worlds by dismantling organizations and initiatives, canceling funding and railing against efforts to combat climate change. While that’s thrown those sectors into disarray, leaders from outside the US said they will continue with their programs.

“The science didn’t change on Jan. 20,” Kyte said, before opening the launch of the findings of a UK-funded study into the health impacts of living near coal-fired power plants. “Even though we see US entities green hushing or mollifying their commitments to ESG, the investment patterns outside the US remain the same,” she said referring to environmental, social and governance issues.

Kyte’s comments come as climate initiatives also deal with the slashing of aid and development budgets by rich European nations — including the UK — that are diverting money to defense after Trump indicated he would water down US security commitments to the bloc.

A shift in focus is necessary, Kyte said.

Climate-finance initiatives will need to attract more money from private investors, multilateral development banks will need reform to play a larger role and a myriad initiatives must be “de-fragmented” to build larger pools of capital, she said.

“There has been an uptick in calls for reform to make the multilateral development-bank system, the international financial architecture, more fit for purpose,” she said. “Bigger, bolder, better. Bigger is the question mark as we see how the US shows up in the international arena, but better and bolder is still on the table.”

Kyte also cautioned that the impact of the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement international climate treaty and climate-finance initiatives should not be overestimated. While the world’s largest economy has pledged billions of dollars to climate initiatives, it has delivered a lot less, she said.

“We have over many years now lived and managed our multilateral climate funds and multilateral development banks, the whole international architecture, on the basis of US pledges that have been unrealized because Congress has been on balance opposed to this kind of expenditure,” she said. We have to “hope that it comes back one day with more than pledges.”

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