As a development professional, traveling to more than 20 countries, I am always very excited at the airport before heading to somewhere. And today, it is time to leave for Katowice, Poland to join COP24.

Over the last semester at Duke, I have started in earnest to study climate change issues. Prior to Duke, as a representative of the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in Azerbaijan, I had some experiences in implementing water supply development projects to increase resilience to climate change. Since 2010, KOICA has supported the Kahriz Rehabilitation Project in Azerbaijan with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the second phase of the project has launched this year as well. I was also involved in identification of A Total Solution for Water Shortages on the Absheron Peninsula under the Korean government’s initiative East Asia Climate Partnership (EACP).

Working on the ground and in headquarters of KOICA, I have seen that financing of climate change, as one of many development priorities, is quite a challenge. Although the Paris Decision in 2015 “strongly urges developed country parties to scale up their level of financial support to USD 100 billion annually by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation,” developed country parties have had trouble in expanding their support dramatically to developing country parties. In 2017, the overall volume of all Official Development Assistance (ODA) from member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), Arab countries, and non-DAC countries was USD 161 billion.

Considering this amount, the annual target of USD 100 billion just for climate change is quite ambitious, and it is completely unrealistic if this USD 100 billion per year is expected to come from new and additional financial resources. On the other hand, when this target was first described in the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, it was suggested that “this funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance”. If the target is so, we already have achieved it: as the Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) has announced, public and private climate finance flows in 2016 was USD 681 billion. So, if we want to set a practical goal, the parities need to define more clearly the scope of climate finance and its target.

According to the recent Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world will be facing more severe problems if we do not break the status-quo soon. To change the situation, the parties have to find consensus to rapidly increase investment for mitigation and adaptation.

Hopefully, there is good news from the beginning of COP24. On the 3rd of December 2018, the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) announced a joint declaration for aligning their activities with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Also, the World Bank group announced a new target of USD 200 billion over five years during 2021-2025. In COP24, I want to see more pledges of the more parties and progress to find more financial resources for climate action.