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Thursday, July 24, 2025

Green Fund balance and disbursements

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28 days ago
20250626
BG ENERGY CHAMBER 2606

BG ENERGY CHAMBER 2606

The Green Fund is an of­ten-over­looked as­set in Trinidad and To­ba­go. It has been qui­et­ly ac­cu­mu­lat­ing a sig­nif­i­cant amount of funds and is rarely ever tapped. At present, the fund con­tains over $11 bil­lion, but on­ly around $326 mil­lion has ever been dis­bursed in 16 years. This da­ta was re­cent­ly re­leased with the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al’s Re­port 2024.

The Green Fund was first es­tab­lished un­der the Fi­nance Act 2000. Oth­er leg­isla­tive pro­vi­sions which ap­ply to the op­er­a­tion of the fund in­clude the Mis­cel­la­neous Tax­es Act, the Green Fund Reg­u­la­tions, 2007 and the Fi­nance Act, 2010. The ob­jec­tive of the fund is to fund en­vi­ron­men­tal projects im­ple­ment­ed by NGOs and sim­i­lar com­mu­ni­ty groups.

The ac­cu­mu­la­tion of funds is easy to un­der­stand. All com­pa­nies and part­ner­ships in T&T pay in­to the fund.

Com­pa­nies and part­ner­ships pay 0.3 per cent of their gross in­come in­to the fund. This in­cludes not-for-prof­it com­pa­nies. Since 2021, the fund has re­ceived on av­er­age $1b per year. While sig­nif­i­cant funds have been ac­cu­mu­lat­ed, very lit­tle has been paid out to or­gan­i­sa­tions to im­ple­ment projects.

Pro­ceeds of the fund are made avail­able to lo­cal reg­is­tered or­gan­i­sa­tions and com­mu­ni­ty groups, whose ac­tiv­i­ties are re­lat­ed to one or more of four fo­cal ar­eas, in­clud­ing re­me­di­a­tion, re­for­esta­tion, en­vi­ron­men­tal ed­u­ca­tion or en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues and con­ser­va­tion of the en­vi­ron­ment.

At the time when the Green Fund was de­vel­oped the fo­cus was on lo­cal en­vi­ron­men­tal projects and is­sues like habi­tat pro­tec­tion and re­for­esta­tion. Cli­mate adap­ta­tion or mit­i­ga­tion did not fig­ure as a ma­jor theme.

Since the sign­ing of the Paris Agree­ment in 2015, there have been in­creas­ing pres­sures to re­duce car­bon emis­sions around the world. T&T of­ten gets a bad rep­u­ta­tion for hav­ing high CO2 emis­sions per capi­ta.

One of the ma­jor chal­lenges fac­ing the coun­try in re­duc­ing emis­sions, is ac­cess to fund­ing. The op­tions open to many projects are ex­ter­nal to the coun­try, with high in­ter­est rates.

The Green Fund of­fers the po­ten­tial to have a do­mes­tic source of fi­nanc­ing to suc­cess­ful­ly un­lock projects like re­new­able en­er­gy projects, car­bon cap­ture projects and en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy projects.

If re­pur­posed, the fund has the po­ten­tial to make a huge dif­fer­ence in the coun­try’s ap­proach to de­car­bon­i­sa­tion and adap­ta­tion for cli­mate change.

The En­er­gy Cham­ber has rec­om­mend­ed that the fund should be re­pur­posed or re­vised to fo­cus on cli­mate change, re­duc­tion in green­house gas emis­sions and cli­mate adap­ta­tion.


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