At this year’s UN Climate Summit in November (COP27), where diplomats from 200 countries will gather in Egypt to negotiate climate change policies and emission cuts, a salient and yet less discussed issue would be on the agenda. This issues concerns compensation for climate disasters. According to the Reuters News Agency, the poorest 14% of the global population living in developing countries are responsible for only 1% of global annual CO2 emissions causing global warming, yet these populations will continue to suffer the harshest consequences from global warming. These regions will endure more severe heat waves, floods, and droughts. When a climate disaster strikes, these countries would have to halt everything and struggle to pull together millions of dollars to rebuild whatever they lose. Governments of developing countries lack the resources to fund community recovery, and by the end of recovery, these governments are often left with less to nothing for investments in key areas such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure. As the planet heats up and natural disasters grow more frequent and intense, developing countries are calling out for assistance from wealthier countries. This aid would be in the form of public loans, grants, and private investments; a kind of a Loss and Damages Fund. Such funds would be used both to compensate for things that are permanently lost, like lives and species, and help with rebuilding homes, replacing crops, and relocating at-risk communities.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, a big advocate for this fund, has emphasized the responsibility that developed countries have towards developing countries, especially as regard to climate disasters. Wealthy developed countries are the primary emitters, a process that majorly began with the Industrial Revolution. Hence, it is also their responsibility to ensure that the less wealthy countries are well compensated for the disaster their development has and is causing. As Lauren Sommer from NPR puts it, “Mottley wants richer countries to stop throwing garbage in her yard and then telling her to clean it up.”
A category 5 hurricane hit the Caribbean Island of Barbuda in 2017, and according to reports from the BBC every building on the island suffered some damage with almost a fourth of infrastructures completely destroyed. The 1800 island residents had to evacuate to nearby Antigua for a month while recovery teams salvaged what was left. During that period, business activities and other functions were halted, with the local economy taking a massive hit. John Mussington, a Barbuda resident, marine biologist, and high school principal, speaking to the BBC said that had there been a loss and damage fund the island community could have rebuilt faster and with new infrastructural systems to help them prepare for future disasters. For example, switching to renewable energy sources such as wind, so that electricity would not entirely go out during another disaster.
Mottley and other representatives from developing countries that regularly face the adverse impact of climate change are strongly pushing for the establishment of a Loss and Damage fund. The proposal to add this issue to the COP27 agenda does not yet have broad support. However, it is likely that developing countries will pressure their wealthier counterparts into confronting the consequences of their economic development. The Covid-19 pandemic, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine has meant that developed countries have focused on their own economic recovery, and supporting Ukraine respectively. And in so doing, much attention has not been paid to other pressing issues such as the impact of climate change on the world’s poorest.
Besides the distractions from Covid-19 and the Russian aggression in Ukraine, there is a legal element to the issue of wealthier nations paying climate compensation to poorer ones. “[Climate change compensation is] always something developed countries have been very cautious about exactly because they don’t want it to be a precedent for international courts,” said Maria Antonia Tigre, a fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “They really do want to avoid that responsibility because it can be endless,” she added.
Providing funding to help developing countries recover from climate change-induced disasters can better bind wealthier nations to climate change responsibilities, thus subjecting them to legal liability whenever disaster strikes. It remains unclear what lengths such legal responsibilities might reach in court, and for what exactly countries might be held responsible for in the future. While these wealthy countries are definitely responsible for the acceleration of climate change, acknowledging and fully accepting responsibility is not something they are willing to do yet, notes Raeed Ali, a climate activist who is part of the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition.
The idea of wealthy countries providing funds to developing countries struggling with climate change disasters is not new, but its history is laced with empty words. In 2009, wealthy countries promised to pay a total of US$100 billion annually by 2020 to poor countries so as to help them prepare for the impact of climate change by improving infrastructures to help them lower their own emissions, through for example, renewable energy systems and sustainable agricultural practices. This fund was never generated nor paid. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), wealthy countries provided a total of $83.3 billion in 2020, $16.7 billion less than what had been promised. In 2015, at the Paris Climate Summit, countries signed an agreement recognizing the need to address this issue of loss and damage, but no concrete steps were taken in this regard. Developed countries have been careful in their rhetoric on climate change and its effects, ensuring that they do not use language that could potentially make them liable for climate change disasters. In 2019, the UN Santiago Network was set up to provide technical assistance to developing countries and handle issues of loss and damage, but the organization did not receive enough funding or staffing, and the network transformed into a weak, merely symbolic group. Last year, at the 26th UN Climate Summit, developing countries fought hard for loss and damage funding and for a formal body to be set up under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. According to the BBC, Scotland pledged 2.7 million dollars towards a Loss and Damage fund, becoming the first country to do so. It is a meagre amount, but with powerful symbolism as a first concrete step. Unfortunately, other countries have not followed Scotland’s path in making similar commitments. Other countries present did agree to a two-year dialogue about loss and damage, but the lack of concrete action is reminiscent of past talks that resulted in no action.
There is a glimmer of hope according to Reuters, who claim that some officials in the United States, the European Union (EU), and other big polluters are increasingly seeing a change in positions regarding a Loss and Damages Fund. Take Germany for example. In July, on a visit to the Pacific Archipelago Palau, Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said her country would prioritize the issue of Loss and Damages in its international climate policy. “This is an issue we haven’t talked enough about for a very long time,” she said. “And it really is about financing.” Hopefully more countries will follow after Scotland and Germany, helping developing countries deal with the global climate disasters.
At the end of the day, providing funds to developing countries is not purely altruistic. It is in the interest of wealthy countries, and of the entire world indeed, to support less developed countries. Olivia Serdeczny, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, specializing in loss and damages said, “[Developed countries] don’t want political systems in developing countries to become destabilized and to be faced with climate migrants”. If developing countries collapse, it will not be good for wealthy countries, because developed countries also rely on developing countries for resources such as crops. And the migration of people from climate affected regions may become burdensome for developed countries to cope with. The collapse of countries due to climate disasters will not be good for an already struggling global economy; realizing this may inspire wealthy countries to aid those at high climate risk, even if altruism would not.
