Financing of climate actions as a global audit topic

The UN Climate Change Conference is currently under way in Glasgow in Great Britain. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, Finland and other industrialized countries undertook to finance developing countries’ efforts of both mitigating and adapting to climate change.

In its audit published earlier this year, the National Audit Office of Finland (NAOF) found that Finland does not have a published plan regarding the amount, allocation, and effectiveness of the increasing climate finance, although the policy of the current Finnish Government is to scale up Finland’s climate finance and to direct one half of it to climate change mitigation and another half to climate change adaptation. It was also found that the financial instruments differ from each other to a great extent in how climate finance is implemented and what information is available on the results.

The NAOF’s audit has been presented in a recently published bulletin of the global Working Group on Environmental Auditing (WGEA). According to a survey conducted by the WGEA, the most popular environmental audit topic in different countries in the next few years will be adaptation to climate change. To view the English publication on the preliminary results of the survey and the audits of other countries, click to https://wgea.org/media/117569/wgea-cop26-bulletin.pdf. An open webinar will also be organized on the topic on 8 December. To receive a link to the webinar, contact the WGEA secretariat: intosaiwgea@vtv.fi.

For the term of 2020–2025, the NAOF chairs the Working Group on Environmental Auditing (WGEA) of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI). The WGEA has 80 member countries, and it develops and supports environmental auditing globally. In 2020–2022, the main topics of the INTOSAI WGEA are plastic waste, sustainable transport, and climate finance, and their links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. www.wgea.org