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While wealthy nations are reportedly on track to provide the billions in climate finance they promised to the developing world, official figures obscure the amount of donor money that is actually going to climate projects, a new report finds.

In 2009, rich countries set a goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020, money intended to help poorer nations wean off fossil fuels and prepare for more extreme weather. Wealthy countries missed their target in 2020, and while they are on track to reach the $100 billion goal this year, they are still falling short of providing needed aid, according to a new report from Oxfam.

More than half of all climate finance is coming in loans, rather than grants, and wealthy countries usually report the full amount of their loans rather than the much smaller amount of their loan subsidies, Oxfam said.

The report also found that much of the grant money for climate change is coming from existing aid funds, with donor countries repurposing up to a third of their overseas aid rather than putting forward new money to help poorer nations cope with warming. And in many cases, funds are going to projects that have little to do with slowing climate change or preparing for its effects.

In 2020, wealthy nations reportedly mobilized $83.3 billion in climate finance. But when accounting only for new donor money directed specifically at climate change, those countries put forward at most $24.5 billion, Oxfam found. Of this, at most $11.5 billion went to projects that would help poorer nations guard against worsening climate disasters.

“Don’t be fooled into thinking $11.5 billion is anywhere near enough for low- and middle-income countries to help their people cope with more and bigger floods, hurricanes, firestorms, droughts, and other terrible harms brought about by climate change,” Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam International’s climate policy lead, said in a statement. “People in the U.S. spend four times more than that each year feeding their cats and dogs.”

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