Top Climate Fund Asks Others to Step Up as US Pulls Billions

(Bloomberg) — A green fund backed by the United Nations is urging countries including India and China to step up after US President Donald Trump pulled $4 billion that it had pledged to the world’s biggest climate asset manager.

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Trump has upended humanitarian aid, development and climate-finance sectors by halting funding. The US leader has also exited the Paris Agreement climate treaty and the World Health Organization.

“It leaves the agenda in a very difficult situation,” Mafalda Duarte, the head of the Green Climate Fund, said in a Feb. 28 interview in Cape Town. “It leaves us with the need for others to take leadership positions.”

China and India, as the world’s biggest and third-largest greenhouse-gas emitters and major economies, could step up their involvement as should other countries she said, calling for a “coalition of the ambitious.”

“Hopefully, we’ll see those countries taking a more prominent role,” she said.

The US is the world’s second-biggest emitter and historically the largest source of carbon stored in the atmosphere.

The Trump administration’s disdain for climate finance and renewable energy threatens to set back the global drive to slow planetary warming at a time when its already behind schedule.

“The US plays a really pivotal role be it in climate, be it in other agendas because it’s the world’s largest economy. It has convening, it has influencing power,” Duarte said on the sidelines of a global meeting of development finance institutions. “They play a really important role in terms of leading and driving others to act in a certain way.”

Obama, Biden

The withdrawal of the funding is the portion of the $6 billion pledged by the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden that’s yet to be paid.

The move is the first time funding has been pulled for the Incheon, South Korea-based institution, which the United Nations formed in 2010. It has $17 billion in investments with a further $3 billion planned this year. European countries collectively have provided the bulk of money, she said.

It’s unclear what impact the funding withdrawal will have on the plans by the GCF, which invests in a range of sectors including climate resilient infrastructure and water-reuse programs. This year’s planned deployment of $3 billion will be a record and by 2030 the fund aims to have invested $50 billion, Duarte said.