New website to track climate aid, key to UN talks

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

GENEVA (Reuters) - A website launched on Friday will help track whether rich countries are keeping a pledge to come up with $30 billion in climate aid for the poor, seen by the U.N. as a "golden key" to progress in talks on global warming.

The United Nations-backed site (www.faststartfinance.org) so far lists cash promises by 6 European donors including Germany and Britain and 27 recipients from Bangladesh to the Marshall Islands. Many of the developing nations have blank entries on the amount of aid received.

Rich countries promised at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 to provide poor nations with "new and additional" climate funds "approaching $30 billion" for 2010-12. Until now, there has been no official site to track compliance.

Countries fill in their own entries on the website, without checks.

"I strongly called on other countries to join," Dutch Environment Minister Tineke Huizinga said of the Dutch-led initiative during a meeting of 46 nations in Geneva reviewing financing for the fight against climate change.

The United Nations praised the site as a step to build trust between rich and poor before an annual meeting of the world's environment ministers in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29-December 10.

"I have always called this short-term financing the golden key to Cancun," Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told a news confernece with Huizinga.

Developing nations say the promised new cash is a test of how far rich nations, which have spewed out most greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution, are willing to lead in combating global warming at a time of austerity cuts.