Ministers meeting in Paris have 24 hours to assemble finance package and avoid 3ºC deal

Time is running out for ministers meeting in Paris to boost adaptation funding levels by 2020 and agree to set new improved finance targets for both adaptation and emissions reductions from when the Paris deal comes into force in 2020, Oxfam said today.

The international agency warned that unless a package emerges at the start of the week, the chance of a deal that could avoid more than 1.5 ºC of warming and help the world’s poorest to adapt is in serious jeopardy.

Oxfam estimates that even with the new pledges announced ahead of Paris, only around $5-8 billion a year will be available for communities to adapt by 2020. At the same time, the key obstacle to an agreement to strengthen the emissions reductions targets pledged ahead of Paris by 180 countries is the absence of funding for developing countries.

Oxfam’s head of advocacy and campaigns, Celine Charveriat said: “Climate funding is the glue that will make the Paris agreement stick. It will be the difference between a minimalist agreement and one that starts to deliver for the world’s poorest people.”

Oxfam called on ministers to remember what is at stake, pointing to the looming global food crisis linked to El Nino and climate change as the latest example of what climate inaction means. Between 40-50 million people are at risk of hunger, disease and water shortages around the world by spring 2016.

Already, around 18 million people need assistance in Ethiopia, Southern Africa, Central America and parts of the Caribbean, South America, Asia and the Pacific. The floods in Chennai, India, last week affected a further 40,000 people.

Charveriat said: “There’s a looming global food crisis, which forms the backdrop to these talks. Ministers should be in no doubt that inadequate action will mean people going hungry.”

This year’s El Nino is expected to be one of the strongest ever measured. We are likely to see strong El Ninos happen more frequently because of climate change, which could in turn make their impact worse due to changing temperatures, rainfall and seasons.

Over the last decade, 77 percent of lives lost from climate-related disasters were in developing countries. The increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather is already making it harder to grow food, with an extra 25 million malnourished children under the age of five by 2050 because of climate change. Hurricane Sandy in the United States in 2012, floods caused by the wettest winter on record in the UK two years ago, and the Russian heatwaves in 2010 show that increasingly extreme weather is a threat to us all.