The chances of the important COP26 climate summit starting in Glasgow later this month succeeding took a hit with rich countries announcing on Monday that they will miss by three years their promise of $100 billion a year as funding to developing and poor countries to help manage the climate crisis.

The highly anticipated climate finance delivery plan released on Monday, produced by the minister of environment and climate change for Canada, Jonathan Wilkinson and the state secretary, federal ministry for the environment, Germany, Jochen Flasbarth, said developed countries will likely be able to mobilise $100 billion a year only in 2023, a delay of three years from the 2020 deadline originally promised.

COP26 President, Alok Sharma had invited the ministers to draft this climate finance delivery plan in July to gain the trust of developing countries on the funding.

The announced plan delivery plan could be detrimental to the success of the summit as it may further erode the trust of developing countries such as India, which have been highlighting the lack of equity and justice in climate negotiations.

There was hope that the developed countries would agree to make good the shortfall in funding in initial years in later years, so as to reach an average of $100 billion a year in the five years to 2025, but that was not to be. Sharma said that it was “highly likely” that the funding would achieve that, but this found no mention in the plan that was released.

Flasbarth, who said he was “disappointed”, added that “there is a lot of money already on the table” and that it would “increase”.

In 2009, at COP15 in Copenhagen, developed countries committed to a goal of raising $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. They specified that the finance would come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral, and multilateral, including alternative ones. The climate finance goal was formalised at COP16 in Cancun.

Separately, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change also released an updated analysis of nationally determined contributions submitted by 143 countries as on October 12 on Monday which suggested that overall there is likely to be a 16% increase in global GHG emissions in 2030 compared to 2010.

Comparison to the latest findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that such an increase, unless changed immediately, is likely to cause a temperature rise of about 2.7°C by the end of the century.

But the information submitted also confirms that the updated or new climate action plans can be effective in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over time.

“This latest report from the UNFCCC makes clear, to protect the world from the most devastating impacts of climate change, countries must take more ambitious action on emissions, and they must act now,” said COP26 president Alok Sharma. “That is why we especially need the biggest emitters, the G20 nations, to come forward with stronger commitments.”

COP26 ‘might go wrong’, warns UK PM Johnson

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday said he was “very worried” that the 12-day COP26 climate summit he will host in Glasgow from later this week “might go wrong”.

But the UK leader told a special Downing Street press conference with children that he remained hopeful a deal can be done to reduce carbon emissions and limit future temperature rises. “I’m very worried because it might go wrong and we might not get the agreements that we need and it’s touch and go,” Johnson said.