A weary chuckle crackled over the line from Glasgow.
That was the sound of a veteran Bangladeshi negotiator asked whether the wealthy economies would finally cough up the $100bn in climate finance they have promised to deliver.
Bangladeshi negotiators and experts speaking from COP26 told me: “Overseas Development Assistance may be charity, but climate finance is our right.
“Adaptation is not our fault; climate impacts were imposed on us.”
This captures the mood around the world: that developed countries have much to do to bridge the trust – and fund – deficit with the developing world.
Top Bangladeshi climate scientist Professor Saleemul Huq has seen this process unfold from the beginning – he has attended every one of the 26 COPs to date. And he has expressed dismay that the recently released draft Glasgow agreement lacks ambition.
He is not in Glasgow as a negotiator for Bangladesh, but as an expert adviser to the LDC group. It is a win for the LDC group that Professor Huq advises, and of which Bangladesh is a member, that the key concern of loss and damage has been included in the draft.
Also in the draft is a commitment to provide climate finance beyond $100bn a year by 2023.
But since developed countries have failed to hit even the $100bn by 2020 target that was made obligatory upon them in 2015, they have much to do to bridge the shortfall in climate funds – and offer a transparent assessment about the state of finance pledges.
“The claim that $78bn has been mobilized by the developed countries is inflated,” a senior Bangladesh negotiator told me. “The preliminary work on uncovering this creative accounting has been done by Oxfam – everyone should take a look at it.”
Oxfam’s Climate Finance Shadow Report 2020 estimated that instead of the $59.5bn per year on average claimed to have been made available by the developed economies as of 2020, the true value was closer to $19-22.5bn.
This lower number, a third of what was claimed, is what one arrives at after stripping out loan repayments, interest, and double-counting methods used to inflate rich country claims.
The Bangladesh negotiator said: “this creative accounting is making the negotiation a process of creative inaction.”
“Moreover, the trend we have seen is that OECD countries have favored loans and reduced grants,” he added.
But adaptation measures – a necessity for Climate Vulnerable Forum countries, a political grouping of which Bangladesh holds the presidency – relate to public goods best supported by grants.
The Oxfam report points out that 80% of all reported public climate finance was provided as loans and not grants.
And half the loans were non-concessional, “offered on ungenerous terms requiring higher repayments from poor countries,” according to the report.
Only a fifth of the funding went to LDCs and a mere 3% went to Small Island Developing States, arguably the most vulnerable countries of all.
The much lauded late-stage agreement between the United States and China on transitioning away from fossil fuels doesn’t change the basic facts: the US won’t hit net zero greenhouse gas emissions before 2050, China won’t hit net zero before 2060 and India won’t before 2070. Those are the second, first and fourth top emitters, respectively.
In other words, climate finance remains a dire necessity for vulnerable communities.
And then there is the seemingly insurmountable problem – perhaps only Alok Sharma’s presidency can lay the guide ropes on this mountain – that there remains no consensually agreed upon definition of climate finance.
Last minute breakthroughs have been known to happen. The Paris climate agreement itself was salvaged by a last-minute intervention.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s move to treble Scotland’s climate fund commitment is a step in the right direction. Then again, Scotland remains cagey about making firm commitments to phasing out oil and gas drilling.
As negotiations go into extra time, there is a fear that the developed economies will continue to duck their duty to climate financing.
After all, we’ve all heard the old line: If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it probably is.