IAnyway, the Chancellor had saved one piece of news for his appearance at the start of the World Climate Conference, the climate policy showdown of heads of state and government from all over the world. “As the G-7 presidency, we want to set up a global protective shield against climate risks,” announced Olaf Scholz on Monday in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. “Germany is providing 170 million euros for this protective shield and climate risk financing.”
With this initiative, Scholz is taking up a demand from the group of countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has now grown to 57 members worldwide. Together with the President of Ghana, who currently chairs the group, Scholz wants to push the project forward at a working breakfast this Tuesday morning. It will initially start with seven countries that are particularly affected by extreme weather and flooding, including Pakistan and Bangladesh. The secretariat will be based in Frankfurt.
The new announcement fits into the framework that Scholz reaffirmed when he appeared in the seaside resort on the Sinai Peninsula: The federal government wants to expand its annual climate finance to six billion euros by 2025, most recently it was 5.3 billion euros. In German government circles, the leap is larger than it appears at first glance: After all, most projects are temporary agreements with individual countries that regularly expire.
Combatting deforestation in the Congo Basin
One focus of German engagement is the fight against deforestation in the Congo Basin, the last large connected CO2-Memory on the planet. In addition, hopes are pinned on the change of government in Brazil, where the Amazon region has become a source of CO under the rule of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro2development has developed. Here the federal government has announced that it will quickly resume the interrupted cooperation on climate protection.
In addition to the plan to compensate for damage and losses caused by climate change, Scholz named “a robust work program for reducing emissions” as a further goal of the conference. He acknowledged that due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis, Germany will burn more coal for power generation by 2024 than originally planned. In return, he referred to the decision to end the use of lignite in the Rhenish mining area as early as 2030. Scholz also reaffirmed the goal that Germany would be climate-neutral by 2045.
Scholz himself will also use his conference visit this Tuesday for a series of bilateral meetings that are not directly related to the climate issue. To this end, three members of the government will travel from Germany in the coming week, when the actual negotiations are entering the final phase: Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Environment Minister Steffi Lemke and Development Minister Svenja Schulze, whose portfolio is responsible for climate cooperation with poorer countries. Economics Minister Robert Habeck will be represented by a State Secretary.
The Federal Foreign Office is in charge of negotiations
This year, for the first time, the negotiations at the conference are no longer being led by the Ministry of the Environment, but by the Federal Foreign Office, whose responsibility for international climate policy has changed since the change of government. That was a wish from Baerbock, who wanted to secure this green core theme. As chief negotiator for the climate negotiations, she had brought former Greenpeace boss Jennifer Morgan to the Federal Foreign Office.
It remains to be seen whether the further splitting up of the issue across different departments will strengthen or weaken Germany’s negotiating position. Different accents were already visible on one important topic, the development of new gas fields. Scholz had recently traveled to Senegal to advance a project off the coast there. However, Baerbock’s State Secretary Morgan had recently stated in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper that there would be no government funding for such projects and that they would probably not pay off economically either.
The Chancellery, on the other hand, is of the opinion that the developing and emerging countries should not be stopped from tapping new energy sources in the interest of their own development, especially since they would also have to rely more on natural gas for a transitional period in order to say goodbye to coal and oil achieve their climate goals. The government headquarters does not expect gas from Russia to flow to other countries in similar quantities as before in the foreseeable future. This too must be compensated for on a global scale.
For Scholz, climate policy is strongly linked to geopolitical upheavals. The aim is to tie countries that have not yet been clearly positioned more closely to the West. Tutoring instructions on climate policy could only be harmful in this context. In Sharm el-Sheikh, he himself wants to promote his project for an international climate club: countries with comparable climate policy ambitions should join forces to create new trade barriers, for example through CO2– Avoid tariffs. From a German perspective, this will also be a measure of the success of the climate conference.