COP18 (03/12/12) – Gustavo A.B da Fonseca from the Global Environment Facility talks about the work his organisation does to mobilise public funding to enable developing countries to meet their obligations.

He says that they need to bring the needs of the developing countries to the attention of the donors and begin to fundraise the money. He says that the biggest issues are getting resources to the scale needed to tackle the problem, which he stress is difficult in the current economic environment.

He says that it is important for them to address where the money is most needed and prioritise those area so that the funding available is not spread so thinly that it does not do any global good.

He also says that there needs to be more work on looking at the linkages of the Rio Conventions – on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. He says that many of these have very related projects on the ground and funding for certain projects could benefit multiple issues.

He says that when these Conventions were formed out of Rio in 1992, there was a fragmented political agenda that was necessary, but now work needs to be done to bring these issues back together in order to address them all more effectively.