Introduction

Countries' contribution to climate change and their capacity to prevent and cope with its consequences vary enormously. The Convention and the Protocol therefore mandate financial and technological transfers from Parties with more resources to those less well endowed and more vulnerable. Limited human and institutional capacity can also cause bottlenecks in policy formation and implementation. Accordingly, in recent years, the COP has adopted a number of decisions to strengthen capacity-building in developing countries as well as EITs.

This chapter describes rules relating to resources – financial, technological and human and institutional – relevant for achieving the substantive commitments contained in the FCCC and the Protocol. This chapter focuses on the Convention's financial mechanism, operated by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which also serves the Protocol. Section 2 describes resource commitments under the Convention and the Protocol, defining who provides financial and technological assistance, to whom, for what and for how much. This section thus explains legal concepts such as ‘new and additional’ resources, ‘incremental costs’ and ‘agreed full costs’. Section 3 describes how the Convention's financial mechanism works. This explains the relationship between the COP and the GEF and how guidance provided by the COP in terms of the policies, programme priorities and eligibility criteria is taken into account by the GEF.