The G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group (SFWG) concluded its last meeting under Brazilian presidency today (10), at an event held in Rio de Janeiro. According to the group’s coordinators, the main deliverable is a report with recommendations for reforming environmental and climate funds. The document was commissioned by the WG from experts on the subject.
Streamlining access to funds by the so-called Global South has always been one of the country’s priorities. Currently, four multilateral mechanisms finance most of the projects that attempt to curb the climate crisis: the Green Climate Fund (Green Climate Fund); Climate Investment Fund (Climate Investment Funds); Adaptation Fund (Adaptation Fund) and the Global Environment Facility (Global Environment Facility).
The criteria for obtaining resources from these funds are considered bureaucratic and difficult by most countries in the Global South. This is what Brazil hopes will change as a result of the G20 meetings.
“We prioritized using the political capital of the G20 to drive a transformation of the world’s main climate and environmental funds. What we achieved here is no small feat. We have an implementation agenda ahead of us, but we managed to get all G20 members to support an agenda to reform the climate finance architecture,” said Ivan Oliveira, coordinator of the group and undersecretary of Financing for Sustainable Development at the Ministry of Finance. “This is strongly connected to President Lula’s foreign policy solidarity agenda. This is a substantial achievement that has the potential to unlock the system, so that the billions of dollars we have allocated to these funds actually reach the countries that need them, more quickly and effectively.”
The Sustainable Finance Task Force was created to mobilize sustainable finance as a means of ensuring global growth and stability. The idea is to promote transitions to greener, more resilient and inclusive societies and economies. The task force is to identify institutional and market barriers to sustainable finance.
According to the coordinators, at the end of the work, the WG managed to advance in the four priority areas proposed by the Brazilian presidency: facilitating access to green funds; principles for a fair transition; sustainability reports; and financial instruments for so-called nature-based solutions.
Cyntia Azevedo, deputy head of the Department of International Relations at the Central Bank of Brazil, participated in the WG and highlighted the importance of institutions making a real commitment to the agenda and avoiding the so-called greenwashingan English term that means creating a false appearance of sustainability for the public.
“Several of the WG’s recommendations are aimed precisely at improving the quality of the data that is produced, its reliability and comparability. It is important for those who are investing to know what each company’s activities are like, to have confidence that what is being sold as sustainable actually is. It is not enough to say that it is sustainable, you have to prove that it is sustainable,” said Cyntia Azevedo.
The next meeting of G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors will take place in Washington DC, United States, as part of the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in October.
