Environmental Legislators Call for a Green Fund

Environmental legislators meeting in Rome Friday and Saturday for the Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE) meeting called for the creation of an international green fund in the Copenhagen protocol. The fund would provide developing countries with financial and technical help to reduce GHG emissions. Thirteen countries are represented at the GLOBE meeting, including the G8 (the U.S., Canada, Britain, German, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia), and the five developing countries with the largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa).

Stephen Byers, president of GLOBE and member of British parliament, said the fund is needed given the “substantial financial resources to be used” in developing countries to reduce emissions. Byers said developed countries need to acknowledge “the large scale of financial transfers required (by) developing countries” to reduce emissions. “We're talking of important amounts of money here.”

Stefania Prestigiacomo, Italian minister for the environment, said that there is an “urgent need to share technology with low carbon content with developing countries, to satisfy these countries' legitimate demand for energy and economic growth without aggravating the environmental equilibrium of the planet.”

José Luis Espinoza Piña, member of the Mexican senate and chair of the commission for the environment and natural resources at his country's congress, said the green fund must be “a bold financial scheme supported by multilateralism, efficiency, and equity. (Its) performance (should) be regulated by contributions from all countries...and constructed around the idea of shared but differentiated responsibilities.”

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