The global climate talks that resume this month in Dubai will depend on a transparent exchange of information and data such as nations' carbon emissions, pollution-cutting targets and capacity-building needs.
An internal audit, however, found U.N. Climate Change's Transparency Division suffered a US$31 million funding gap – 70% of its annual budget – and had "the need to strengthen internal controls relating to some aspects of strategic planning, project management and administrative services."
U.N. Climate Change, known more technically as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, set up an organizational structure that was "not aligned with its strategic objectives," according to an audit by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, OIOS.
"As a result, units created work plans based on tasks that they were responsible for, rather than plans driven towards contributing to the achievement of overall objectives," it said. "Further, the strategic objectives were framed in a broad and general manner as never-ending tasks."
The secretariat for the 198-nation convention, which encompasses the 2015 Paris Agreement and 1997 Kyoto Protocol, was set up in 1992 to coordinate the global response to the threat of climate change. The original secretariat was in Geneva but moved to Bonn, Germany in 1996.
On Friday, the division touted its efforts at "boosting climate transparency and multi-stakeholder collaboration" in the Asia-Pacific region ahead of global climate talks that will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.
Donald Cooper, director of U.N. Climate Change's Transparency Division, told Asia-Pacific Climate Week 2023 last week there are "two key points which drive us forward: First of all you need vision. And secondly, you need ambition."
"I'm often asked why I'm passionate about climate. It's because my job is to save the world," he said at the gathering in Malaysia. "We are currently living in a 1.1° to 1.2° world, and it is not going so well. Severe floods, massive droughts, sometimes in the same country."
Cooper did not respond to a request for comment. The 196 nations that signed the Paris climate treaty committed to hold warming this century to under 2° above pre-industrial levels, or preferably 1.5°. The average global temperature is now 1.2° above pre-industrial levels; this year is on track to be the hottest ever recorded.
'Core activities' depend on 'supplementary' fundraising
The Transparency Division supports the monitoring, reporting and verification of greenhouse gases, forest programs and agriculture and provides technical assistance and training to developing countries.
But the audit, conducted from January 2020 to March 2023, noted each of the seven climate summits held since 2014 were "assigning more tasks" to the U.N. treaty secretariat with the financial disclaimer that "the secretariat should do what it can with the funds it has."
That put the onus on the secretariat "to raise the funds to undertake its core activities," the audit said, making almost 60% of the division's budget dependent on "supplementary funding."
Delays in getting nations' assessed contributions "exacerbated the funding gaps, with contributions in the amount of US$31 million remaining outstanding" as of the end of March, the audit said. "Resource mobilization is therefore a critical task that needs to be a strategic objective of the UNFCCC secretariat and permeate the work of every division."
OIOS said it recommended twice before that the secretariat develop a strategic plan, and though the secretariat "indicated that it would do so, it had not been done."
In its response to the audit, managers pledged to craft such a plan by December 2024 and "to strive to improve the unit work plans making them consistent with the achievement of the strategic objectives as well as financial reporting in relation to the objectives."
The secretariat told OIOS, which released the audit at the end of September, that it accepted all of the audit's recommendations and has begun making efforts to implement them over the next two years.
This story has been updated with additional details.
