Call for aid on climate change

Poor nations need help from countries who produce emissions

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A prominent developing-world leader on the issue of climate change said Monday that global taxes on the financial services, oil and gas, and shipping industries could drum up hundreds of billions of dollars for poorer countries to adapt and cope with global warming.

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley focused on how poorer countries, with help from richer countries and international finance, could shoulder the astronomical costs to adapt to climate change, reduce its future impact and pay for losses and damage caused as climate trouble like floods, forest fires and heat waves rip through communities.

The U.N. climate summit known as COP28, which is being presided over by the head of the United Arab Emirates’ biggest oil company, put its attention Monday on how developing countries could possibly pay trillions of dollars that experts say they will need to cope with global warming.

“This has probably been the most progress we’ve seen in the last 12 months on finance,” Mottley told reporters about pledges to fund the transition to clean energy, adapt to climate change and respond to extreme weather events.

“But we’re not where we need to be yet,” she said.

World Bank President Ajay Banga laid out five target areas in climate finance. His bank wants to lower methane emissions from waste management and farming, help Africa with greener energies, support “voluntary” carbon markets such as for forest projects and allow developing countries hit by natural disasters to pause debt repayments.

The multilateral development bank, above all, wants to boost its role in climate finance in short order.

“Forty-five percent of our financing will go to climate by 2025,” Banga said, with half going to adapting to the warming climate and the other half on slashing emissions.

“We cannot make climate only be about emissions. It has to be about the downstream impact that the Global South is facing from the emission-heavy growth that we have enjoyed in other parts of the world.”

That alluded to a major theme in climate talks: Developing nations are especially vulnerable to climate catastrophes, but far less responsible for global warming than industrialized countries, which have been belching carbon into the atmosphere for generations as they grew richer — and that excess greenhouse gas in the air has trapped heat near the Earth.