Calls grow for climate reparations
Sturgeon urges rich countries to follow Scotland’s pledge
GLASGOW, Scotland — For as long as there have been international climate talks, Saleemul Huq, a botanist from Bangladesh, has quietly counseled diplomats and activists on the prickliest question: What is owed to countries least responsible for the problem of global warming but most harmed by its effects — and by whom?
Year after year, calls have steadily grown louder for industrialized nations responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions already heating up the planet to own up to the problem — and pay for the damage.
This year, demands for redress have sharpened as climate justice has become a rallying cry, not just from countries in the global south, like Huq’s, but from a broad range of activists, especially young people, in the United States and Europe. They have peaked in Glasgow: As negotiations close this week, a major point of contention between rich and poor countries is whether the final summit document will acknowledge the need for a separate pool of money to address historic harms.
Every country has to agree on every word in the text.
Known by sterile code words crafted to avoid blame, “loss and damage,” that fund would be separate from money to help poor countries adapt to a changing climate, its proponents have argued. Loss and damage is a matter of historic responsibility and would pay for irreparable losses, such as the disappearance of national territory, culture and ecosystems, they said.
“The term ‘loss and damage’ is a euphemism for terms we’re not allowed to use, which are ‘liability
and compensation,’ ” Huq said. ‘ “Reparations’ is even worse.”
The United States, which is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases historically, has long been cool to the idea. But in Glasgow, it signed a statement agreeing to “increase resources” for loss and damage, without committing to anything more specific.
The U.S. climate envoy, John Kerry, said Thursday that any agreement on loss and damage would have to shield countries from legal claims. “We’re going to work hard to deal with that issue over here,” he said.
In the real world, beyond the windowless chambers where negotiators are arguing over the words of the final document, three factors have made it harder to ignore
the demands for loss and damage money.
Courts around the world are already hearing liability cases against governments and fossil fuel companies, and in some cases ruling against those governments and companies for the damages they have already caused.
Second, it has become impossible for leaders of wealthy countries to ignore big-ticket losses and damages when extreme weather events exacerbated by rising temperatures are taking a toll in their own countries, including record wildfires this year in California and floods in Germany.
“We have entered what I call the era of loss and damage,” Huq said.
Nicola Sturgeon, prime minister of Scotland, broke
something of a taboo among rich countries. She said Scotland would devote about $2.8 million to address what it called “structural inequalities.”
“Finance is key to this not as an act of charity but as an act of reparation,” she said Thursday at the summit. She called on rich countries to “start to pay their debt to the developing countries around the world.”
Huq called Sturgeon’s announcement a vital nudge. Scotland, after all, describes itself as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, a center of shipbuilding and heavy industry, which profited from British colonialism and the African slave trade before that.
Scotland’s pledge is “not for charity, not for helping poor people, but taking responsibility and paying a debt to the people who are going to be affected,” Huq said.
The latest draft statement from the summit, released Wednesday, says little about loss and damage except to cite the “urgency of scaling up action and support, including finance” for loss and damage. It says nothing specific about setting up a separate funding stream nor how much. This led a bloc of island nations to say that emerging economies would not put forth more ambitious emissions reductions targets, “if we don’t scale up the provision of finance, and this includes the long overdue recognition of a separate and additional component for loss and damage.”
A fight on the issue is expected in the closing hours of the summit.
Estimates of the amount of money required to address loss and damage varies widely, from roughly $300 billion to $600 billion a year by 2030. At the moment, rich countries have failed to shore up the $100 billion they promised to deliver annually by 2020. That aid is designed to help countries adapt to climate change; it doesn’t include funds to address permanent damage.
This week, negotiators from developing countries working on language around loss and damage said their counterparts from wealthy nations had not yet agreed to include any specific reference to a separate fund for loss and damage.
“We will make them change their mind,” Huq said.