Climate Change: Obama To Announce $3B To UN Green Climate Fund

The U.S. will commit $3 billion to readying poor countries for climate change, President Barack Obama is expected to announce Friday, according to the Guardian. The money will help nations struggling with rising sea levels and extreme weather cope with the effects of global warming. It will also help fund clean-energy initiatives, administration officials said.

The details of the plan will be unveiled during a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, where world leaders will discuss the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund on Friday. The fund was started in 2009 to support projects, policies and programs in developing countries. The goal is to raise $100 billion per year by 2020.

“We’re doing this because it is in our national interest to build resilience in developing countries to climate change,” a senior administration official, who remained anonymous, told the New York Times. Several other countries will contribute financial support, including the second biggest donor, Japan, which has pledged $1.5 billion to the fund. Germany and France each pledged $1 billion; Sweden will give $500 million, and Switzerland will donate $100 million, the Guardian reports. Australia has not committed to the fund.

“We’re not going to be making any contributions to that,” Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Guardian Australia earlier this month. He said the fund was “socialism masquerading as environmentalism.”

Earlier this week, Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping unveiled a joint plan toward stricter targets on greenhouse gas emissions in their countries. The historic deal would see the U.S. reduce emission by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. China has pledged to cap its emissions by 2030 and to increase its share of clean energy to 20 percent by 2025.

"The seriousness of the challenge calls upon the two sides to work constructively together for the common good," the White House said in a statement. "To this end, President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping ... will work together, and with other countries, to adopt a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the convention applicable to all parties at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris in 2015."