‘Loss & damage’ activists demand justice
Climate campaign groups marched at the UN climate summit in Sharm el-sheikh on Saturday, calling for reparations for rising “loss and damage” caused by global warming, under the watchful eye of security staff who controlled the protest tightly.
The activists, including many Africans, insisted there could be “no climate justice without human rights” - and lamented that they had not been permitted to demonstrate outside the sprawling convention centre where the two-week talks are being held.
After marching down a road between two buildings packed with “pavilions” where countries and organisations are showcasing measures they are taking to tackle climate change, about 600 protesters gathered in the desert sun for a rally.
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, an environmental and indigenous rights activist from Chad who is also a UN climate “champion“, said her people were dying because of floods and droughts, while indigenous people in the Pacific were losing their homelands.
“We cannot accept any decision here without loss and damage reparations,” she told the crowd, adding that keeping to the 1.5 degrees-celsius global warming limit in the Paris Agreement “is not negotiable.”
The issue of “loss and damage” has climbed to the top of the political agenda at U.N. climate talks as the harm being done to frontline communities by extreme weather and rising seas has accelerated and spread in all parts of the world in recent years.
Developing nations are pushing hard at the COP27 summit in Egypt for a new fund to repair “loss and damage” from climate disasters - and for separate finance to try to prevent them happening.
But while wealthy nations have now recognised the problem, they remain reluctant to dig into their own pockets.
Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network, which unites more than 1,900 non-governmental groups, told the rally people are suffering worldwide because of climate impacts, but also because of an “unjust and oppressive” economic system.
“The governments who have caused the climate crisis and made those who are least responsible for this crisis pay for it through their lives, their livelihoods, their homes and cultures - they owe us these reparations and they need to pay up now,” she said.
Nnimmo Bassey, director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation, repeated demands made earlier in the week that fossil fuel lobbyists — who number 636 at COP27, up 25% from last year — should be “kicked out of the COP”.
Climate activists are pushing back against African states like Uganda and Senegal, that want to sell their oil and gas reserves to Europe and beyond.
“No to fossil colonialism,” Bassey said, adding Africans did not want their forests and rivers used for carbon offsetting either”