New and additional to what? Assessing options for baselines to assess climate finance pledges

All major climate policy agreements – the UN Framework Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and recently the Cancún Agreements – have stated that climate finance for developing countries will be ‘new and additional’. However, the term ‘new and additional’ has never been properly defined. Agreeing to a system to measure a baseline from which ‘new and additional’ funding will be calculated will be central to building trust and realizing any post-Kyoto agreement. We explore eight different options for a baseline, and assess each according to several criteria: novelty to existing pledges, additionality to development assistance, environmental effectiveness, distributional consequences, and institutional and political feasibility. Only two baseline options do well on these criteria and are therefore viable: ‘new sources only' and ‘above pre-defined business as usual level of development assistance’.