Climate disasters: vulnerable countries wait endlessly for the first dollar from the new fund
Paris, France
July 08, 2024
By Chloรฉ FARAND
Not another year: the world’s poorest countries, on the front line of climate change, warn that they can wait no longer for the first aid from the “loss and damage” fund, created at COP28 in November 2023 but still far from operational.
The call came at the end, on Friday July 12, of the second meeting to set up the fund, which was adopted with great fanfare at the Dubai COP after years of tough negotiations.
At a time when the devastation caused by floods and hurricanes is multiplying worldwide as a result of warming caused by fossil fuels, “we can’t wait until the end of 2025 for the first funds to be released”, says Adao Soares Barbosa, East Timor’s representative on the fund’s board of directors.
“The losses and damage will not wait for us,” stresses this long-standing negotiator for the world’s poorest nations.
Since the adoption of the fund at COP28, complex and tense negotiations between North and South have resumed to finalize its structure. The pace of these negotiations is insufficient to keep pace with climate-related disasters.
“The urgent needs of vulnerable countries and communities cannot be ignored until every detail of this fund has been finalized,” insists Mr. Barbosa. Barbosa.
The cost of climate-related disasters runs into billions of dollars. However, the fund has only received $661 million in pledges from wealthy countries (Germany, France, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, etc.).
Insufficient to cover the cost of a single major disaster,” laments Camilla More of the International Institute for Environment and Development. South Korea, host of the meeting, has just announced a new donation of 7 million dollars.
Despite progress on getting the fund up and running, “it’s clear that the developed countries, whose historic emissions (of greenhouse gases, editor’s note) have indisputably fuelled the climate crisis, are still not prepared to mobilize the hundreds of billions of dollars needed”, laments Harjeet Singh, an activist with the Fossil Energy Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.
– Enormous pressure –
As a fresh illustration of the need, Hurricane Beryl, boosted by record temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, wreaked havoc on poor Caribbean islands.
“In five Grenadine islands… 90% of the dwellings have disappeared… Houses are down like houses of cards and torn to shreds, roofs are gone, trees are gone, there’s no food, no water, no electricity,” Elizabeth Thompson, representing Barbados, told the meeting.
“We can’t carry on chatting while people live and die in a crisis for which they are not responsible”, she added, calling for a fund reflecting the “urgency and scale” of the response required.
The “massive” destruction of recent weeks “puts immense pressure on us to do our job”, admitted Richard Sherman, the South African co-chairman of the board.
Its members want payments to be approved “as soon as possible, but realistically by mid-2025”, according to an internal document consulted by AFP.
– 400 billion a year –
According to some estimates, developing countries need more than $400 billion a year to rebuild after climate-related disasters. One study has put the global bill at between $290 and $580 billion a year between now and 2030, and even more in the future.
In 2022, unprecedented flooding in Pakistan caused more than $30 billion in damage and economic losses, according to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations.
In the meantime, technical discussions are continuing to flesh out the operation of the loss and damage fund to determine who will be the beneficiaries, how the money will be allocated and in what form (loans or grants).
On Tuesday July 09, 2024 more than 350 NGOs wrote to the fund’s members to demand that a substantial share be distributed directly in the form of small grants to local communities and indigenous groups, without going through the states.
The fund will be provisionally hosted by the World Bank, a decision taken despite the hostility of the countries of the South, who have however obtained in recent days that the board of directors be located in the Philippines.
Humaniterre with AFP
