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Underscoring the urgency of acting to stop global warming,
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the COP26 climate
conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow that the United
States would join Britain in backing the Climate Investment
Funds' (CIF) new Capital Market Mechanism and its innovative
leveraging structure.
She said the initiative would help attract significant new
private climate funds and provide $500 million per year for the
CIF's Clean Technology Fund, as well as its new Accelerating
Coal Transition investment program.
CIF was established in 2008 to mobilize resources and
investments in low- and middle-income countries. It has drawn
some $10.5 billion in pledges from 14 contributor countries and
leveraged $61 billion in funding from other sources for projects
that have benefited 72 countries to date.
"The climate crisis is already here. This is not a challenge for
future generations, but one we must confront today," Yellen said
in prepared remarks. "Rising to this challenge will require the
wholesale transformation of our carbon-intensive economies."
The undertaking is expected to cost between $100 trillion and
$150 trillion over the next three decades, and also offers
enormous opportunities for growth and investment, she said.
U.S. President Joe Biden has announced plans to quadruple U.S.
support for climate finance for developing countries by 2024 to
more than $11 billion, but the private sector needed to
participate as well, Yellen said.
"As big as the public sector effort is across all our countries,
the $100-trillion plus price tag to address climate change
globally is far bigger," she said.
Yellen, who met with financial executives on Tuesday, said
financial institutions with collective assets under management
of nearly $100 trillion had united under the Glasgow Financial
Alliance for Net Zero, or GFANZ, pledging to make their
portfolios carbon-neutral by 2050.
In the United States, Yellen said the Financial Stability
Oversight Council was working to enhance climate-related data
and disclosures available to investors, market participants, and
regulators, and Washington would work with its partners to
support similar efforts on a global scale.
It was also critical to increase the transparency of data about
infrastructure projects, Yellen said, underscoring her support
for a new Group of 20 initiative to implement specific
principles for infrastructure investments.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by David Gregorio)
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