Wealthy countries have met their global climate finance targets two years late, according to the OECD.

BRUSSELS: Rich countries have met their pledge to provide $100 billion by 2022 to help poorer countries tackle climate change, the OECD said on Wednesday, confirming that the target had been met two years late.

In 2009, rich countries pledged to provide $100 billion a year in aid from 2020 to poorer countries succumbing to the costs of worsening climate change disasters.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said in a report that it had met its target for the first time, providing $115.9 billion in climate finance in 2022. The total includes private financing mobilised through public funds.

$100 billion is far less than the trillions of dollars that developing countries need to rapidly invest in clean energy to meet climate goals and protect societies from extreme weather and rising sea levels.

But the shortfall has become politically symbolic, fuelling mistrust among nations at recent UN climate talks, with some developing countries arguing they cannot make more ambitious climate pledges without the financial support they have pledged from the world's largest economies.

Finance will be at the center of this year's UN COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November. A key challenge will be setting new targets for climate finance for developing countries to replace the current $100 billion target for 2025.

Already, countries are divided over what the new targets should be.

The European Union, currently the world's largest donor of climate change, is among the wealthy nations calling for more countries to contribute money towards the new targets, including large emerging economies and those with high carbon emissions and per capita wealth, such as China and Middle Eastern countries.

China, currently the world's largest carbon dioxide emitter, has staunchly opposed this in previous UN climate change talks.

China and most other countries are not currently obligated to contribute to UN climate financing targets. The list of obligated countries has not been updated since 1992, but includes about two dozen countries that already industrialized decades ago.