Climate compensation fund is approved in historic U.N. deal
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Negotiators early Sunday approved a historic deal that would create a fund for compensating poor nations that are victims of extreme weather worsened by rich countries’ carbon pollution, but an overall larger agreement still was up in the air because of a fight over emission reduction efforts.
The decision establishes a fund for what negotiators call loss and damage. It is a big win for poorer nations that have long called for cash — sometimes viewed as reparations — because they are often the victims of climate-worsened floods, droughts, heat waves, famines and storms despite having contributed relatively little to the pollution that heats up the globe.
“This is how a 30-year-old journey of ours has finally, we hope, found fruition today,” said Pakistani Climate Minister Sherry Rehman, who often took the lead for the world’s poorest nations.
for the “loss and damage” they’re suffering due to floods, droughts, famine, heat waves and storms worsened by climate change despite emitting a small fraction of heat-trapping carbon pollution.
It has also long been called an issue of climate justice.
“Today, the international community has restored global faith in this critical process that is dedicated to ensuring no one is left behind,” said Antigua and Barbuda’s Molwyn Joseph, who chairs the organization of small island states that has been vocal on loss and damage. “The agreements made at COP27 are a win for our entire world. We have shown those who have felt neglected that we hear you, we see you, and we are giving you the respect and care you deserve.”
A deal of sorts came after a game of climate change chicken over the cause of warming: fossil fuel burning.
Early Sunday morning, delegates approved the compensation fund but had not dealt with the contentious issues of an overall temperature goal, emissions cutting and the desire to target all fossil fuels for phase-down. As dawn was breaking, the European Union and other nations fought back what they considered backsliding in the Egyptian presidency’s overarching cover agreement and threatened to scuttle the rest of the process.
The package was revised again and this time didn’t have what the Europeans would consider backsliding.
“It’s not as strong as we would like it to be, but it does not break” with what was decided at last year’s U.N. climate conference, said Norwegian Climate and Environment Minister Espen Barth Eide. “It does not raise ambition further, so that’s something we have to work with in COP28” next year.
This year’s talks “were very focused on the fund and less on the mitigation [cutting emissions] part,” Eide added.
The agreement includes a veiled reference to the benefits of natural gas as lowemission energy, despite many nations calling for a phase-down of natural gas, which does contribute to climate change.
The new agreement does not ratchet up calls for reducing emissions. But it does retain language to keep alive the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial times. The Egyptian presidency kept offering proposals that harked back to the 2015 Paris agreement, which also mentioned a looser goal of 2 degrees. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees.
Nor does the deal expand on last year’s call to phase down global use of “unabated coal” even though India and other countries pushed to include oil and natural gas in language from last year’s COP26 conference. That too was the subject of last-minute debate.
However, that fight was overshadowed by the historic compensation fund.
Harjeet Singh of the environmental group Climate Action Network Interna compensation tional said the new fund had effectively “sent a warning shot to polluters that they can no longer go scot-free with their climate destruction.”
“From now on, they will have to pay up for the damages they cause and are accountable to the people who are facing supercharged storms, devastating floods and rising seas,” he said.
Outside experts hailed the decision as historic.
“This loss and damage fund will be a lifeline for poor families whose houses are destroyed, farmers whose fields are ruined, and islanders forced from their ancestral homes,” said Ani Dasgupta, president of the environmental think tank World Resources Institute, minutes after the early morning approval. “This positive outcome from COP27 is an important step toward rebuilding trust with vulnerable countries.”
“Quite a few positives to celebrate amidst the gloom and doom” of not cutting emissions fast enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, said climate scientist Maarten van Aalst of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, which responds to climate disasters.
It’s a reflection of what can be done when the poorest nations remain unified, said Alex Scott, a climate diplomacy expert at the think tank E3G. “I think this is huge to have governments coming together to actually work out at least the first step of ... how to deal with the issue of loss and damage,” Scott said.
But as with all climate financials, she said, it is one thing to create a fund, and it’s another to get money flowing. The developed world still has not kept its 2009 pledge to spend $100 billion a year in other climate aid designed to help poor nations develop green energy and adapt to warming.
“Loss and damage is a way of both recognizing past harm and compensating for that past harm,” said Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, who calculated dollar amounts for each country’s warming. “These harms are scientifically identifiable.”
University of Maryland environmental health and justice professor Sacoby Wilson said that “reparations” was “an appropriate term to use,” because the rich northern countries got the benefits of fossil fuels, while the poorer global south gets the damage in floods, droughts, climate refugees and hunger.
‘Today, the international community has restored global faith in this critical process that is dedicated to ensuring no one is left behind.’ — Molwyn Joseph, Antigua and Barbuda climate official