Where’s the money?

Six years ago in Copenhagen, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, brought the moribund negotiations on a deal to slow climate change back from the dead with a single promise of $100 billion a year to help the world’s poor nations.

The world’s advanced industrial nations committed to “mobilizing jointly $100 billion a year by 2020, to address the needs of developing countries.” The money was to come from “a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.”

Halfway toward that target date, policy makers are preparing for yet another climate conclave in Paris starting at the end of November. It is shaping up to be the most important yet, drawing in every country — rich and poor — to the collective effort against a changing climate, which poses its greatest immediate threat in places like Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa.

But where’s the money?

“Financing is the most challenging aspect of the whole deal,” Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told me over the summer. “There is no credible road map to the $100 billion.”