Cross-border flows of finance have already taken a huge knock since the financial crisis (see chart), driving up the costs of borrowing and reducing investment returns.
The world's only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has "essentially collapsed", jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.
Governments in Paris last year not only pledged to phase out fossil fuels in the long term but to make flows of finance consistent with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Oxfam said the agreement would offer a "frayed lifeline" to the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, but warned measures to ensure predictable flows of finance to developing countries to help them deal with climate change had been dropped.
It is force of change that is shaded, shaped, speeded and slowed by various factors, such as the nature of a neighbourhood, flows of finance, the availability of land, the powers and priorities of different layers of government and by skittish stuff like personal taste.
Last week we discussed a whole range of issues, from the need to make deep enough CO2 cuts to keep temperature rise within 2C (thus preventing the most dangerous climate change), to the need to create large, predictable flows of finance to help the poorest to adapt and to move to low-carbon growth.
This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.What would all that mean in practice?
These, he said, consisted of the supply of military equipment and training to the Kurdish security forces, providing political support to the new Iraqi government and leading diplomatic action in the UN to disrupt flows of finance to IS.
"There is a need for the developing countries to see that there would be certainty in terms of future flows of finance, otherwise we won't see much ownership of this process from many of the parties in Paris," said Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, a senior negotiator from the Democratic Republic of Congo, speaking to me earlier this year.
Instead he wanted to halt the flow of financing to questionable providers at the first sign something was amiss.
