COP27
Eko Hot Blog reports that delegates from nearly 200 countries at the COP27 climate summit have agreed to establish a “loss and damage” fund aimed at helping vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters.
The landmark deal was secured early Sunday morning in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
According to CNN, delegates were still working to hammer out other controversial parts of the agreement, including a proposal to include a call to phase out all fossil fuels, rather than just coal.
The fund will focus on what can be done to support loss and damage resources, but it does not include liability or compensation provisions, a senior US official told CNN.
As of the time of filing this report, details on how the fund would operate remained sketchy.
The text does not say when the deal will be finalised and become operational, and how exactly it would be funded.
It also mentions a transitional committee that will help nail down those details, but doesn’t set specific future deadlines.
Although climate experts celebrated the win, they noted the uncertainty going forward.
“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,” World Resources Institute CEO Ani Dasgupta said.
“At the same time, developing countries are leaving Egypt without clear assurances about how the loss and damage fund will be overseen.”
The conference first went into overtime on Saturday before continuing into the early hours of Sunday morning, with negotiators still working out the details as the workers were dismantling the venue around them.
Earlier on Saturday, EU officials threatened to walk out of the meeting if the final agreement fails to endorse the goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Global scientists have for decades warned that warming must be limited to 1.5 degrees – a threshold that is fast-approaching as the planet’s average temperature has already climbed to around 1.1 degrees.
Beyond 1.5 degrees, the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages will increase dramatically, scientists said in the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
In a news conference Saturday morning, the EU’s Green Deal tsar Frans Timmermans, said that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”
“We do not want 1.5 Celsius to die here and today. That to us is completely unacceptable,” he said.
Negotiators and non-governmental organisations observing the talks said the fund was a significant achievement, after developing nations and small island countries banded together to amplify pressure.
The deal marks the first time countries and groups, including longtime holdouts like the United States and the European Union, have agreed to establish a “loss and damage” fund for nations vulnerable to climate disasters made worse by pollution disproportionately produced by wealthy, industrialised nations.
The historic agreement comes less than two weeks after President Muhammadu Buhari called out the rich countries for their climate hypocrisy.
In a scathing Washington Post op-ed, Buhari said many of his fellow African leaders are frustrated, while accusing Western leaders of failing to take responsibility for their contribution to the climate crisis.
The Nigerian leader lamented that Africa is the continent worst affected by climate change despite contributing the least to it.
He subsequently made four demands, emphasising that Africa is not the problem, including a request that “rich countries should direct a greater share of funding to developing nations’ adaptation to the effects of climate change.” The newly agreed climate fund is poised to do just that.
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