Britain ‘not liable’ for historic damage to climate

Minister at Cop 27 says UK should not pay compensation for past centuries

BRITAIN should not be held responsible for the damage it did to the climate before the world knew about global warming, Gabon’s environment minister has said.

Lee White, a British-born environmentalist, was speaking in Sharm el-Sheikh, where climate compensation is a major issue at the Cop27 conference

“At some point in history, we knew about climate change and it wasn’t during the Industrial Revolution in the UK,” he said “So I don’t personally think one would hold the UK accountable from the very first steam engine.”

Gabon, a country of just over 2 million people on the west coast of central Africa, is a member of the G77 bloc of countries calling for climate compensation.

Poorer countries say rich polluting nations should contribute to help them recover from natural disasters made worse by climate change.

Although Gabon, which is 90 per cent forest, is relatively resilient to the impacts of climate change and may not benefit, Mr White says he agrees with the demands of other developing nations.

“There is a point, probably Rio [the climate conference in 1992], where countries knew what we were doing to the atmosphere and what the consequences were going to be,” he said.

“So when you see a small island, whose entire economy is wiped out overnight by one storm, which has been made an order of magnitude stronger because of climate change, then the principle that there should be a way to compensate that country, I think is absolutely right.

“All the countries that are spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere know that that’s going to cause great suffering to many of the developing nations that don’t have the capacity to adapt and to compensate the way developed nations do.

“Until we find a way to deal with that. It’s going to be very difficult to move these negotiations to where they need to get for everybody.”

Compensation is on the official Cop agenda for the first time and countries will be expected to reach an initial agreement before the conference ends on Friday.

Vulnerable countries are calling for a new fund to be set up to help them respond to natural disasters, such as the floods that swept Pakistan this summer.

The UK, US and EU are arguing existing funds can be diverted or renamed as compensation.

But Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said a satisfactory outcome would be “money in the hands of people who are losing their lives and livelihoods due to climate change”.

“It needs to be new funds because we already know that there isn’t enough. The pie isn’t big enough,” she added.

Several world leaders have suggested compensation could be funded by internationally agreed taxes on the profits of oil and gas companies, or on aviation fuels.

However, Grant Shapps, the Business Secretary, ruled out new aviation taxes in an interview in Sharm elSheikh.

“We don’t want to get distracted into cul de sacs on this,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “We’ve got to face this globally. Specifically on aviation, there already are taxes.”