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Climate finance as a business model

How Dutch climate negotiators colluded with business and undermined climate finance for developing countries

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Written by: Chris Kaspar de Ploeg
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By investigative journalist Chris Kaspar de Ploeg(opens in new window) in collaboration with SOMO.

Delegations from around the world are currently convening in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm El-Sheikh in a new attempt to tackle the climate crisis. The hopes of the 2015 Paris climate summit, when the world agreed for the first time to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming, are now long gone. Global emissions are still rising and climate negotiations are difficult. A thorny issue is climate finance for low-income countries, which do not have the money for an energy transition. Rich countries have not kept their promises and the Netherlands is also falling tremendously short in this area. How can that be?

To answer that question, we looked at dozens of studies and thousands of pages of Wob-obtained documents from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, revealing the Dutch negotiating strategy at climate summits between 2013 and 2017. The documents show that business interests are well represented in the views of the Dutch delegation. The Ministry of Economic Affairs is also constantly trying to get out of its commitments to poorer countries. This does not bode well for the climate summit in Egypt.

The complete article is available on our Dutch website.

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Posted in category:
Long read
Written by:
Written by: Chris Kaspar de Ploeg
Published on:

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