Germany tops €6 bln climate finance target for poorer nations three years early

Public climate financing from Germany for poorer countries reached a new record level last year, already surpassing the 6-billion euro target set for 2025, the government has said. A total of 6.39 billion euros was provided to help countries with fewer financial resources adapt and respond to climate change. The government reported this sum to the EU Commission, which collects the figures for the entire EU. “Germany is therefore doing its fair share of the industrialised countries' promise to mobilise 100 billion US dollars per year to combat climate change in developing and emerging countries,” according to a joint press release published by the economy and climate ministry (BMWK) and development ministry (BMZ). “What matters now is that other industrialised countries also pay their fair share of our joint promise,” said development minister Svenja Schulze. “This is not only a key issue of trust between industrialised and developing countries, it would also help us hold other countries like China or the Gulf States to account."

“Ultimately, it is about enabling the countries of the global South to meet their own climate protection commitments,” explained economy and climate minister Robert Habeck. He added that Germany intended to increasingly use its resources to leverage private capital to increase the effectiveness of climate finance. In 2021, Germany increased public climate finance to 5.34 billion euros. However, Oxfam criticised the accounting by richer countries, saying that the true value of their support is only about a third of what is being reported. Aside from budget funds, the ministries said in their press release that Germany’s total climate finance, which includes other public spending and private donors on top of the 6.39 billion euros, rose to around 8.8 billion euros. This sum counts as Germany’s contribution to the 100 billion dollar climate finance pledge made by richer countries at the UN climate change conference, COP15, in Copenhagen in 2009.

Last year, around 2.8 billion euros of Germany’s public climate finance went to climate change adaptation. “Significantly more food security development projects were financed that focus on climate change as a cause of drought and hunger and, for example, advance climate-adapted agricultural methods,” the ministries said.