Many termed it to be more loss and damages in future while others recognized it as a symbolic win.
The ‘Implementation COP’ still stands short of becoming one. The deadlocks still interfere with a full-fledged fight against climate change and the impacts it bears: the every-increasing burden of emissions and the need for urgent limits, $100 billion financing and more and the call to phase down just coal or everything dark.
The meeting of world nations at Sharm-al Sheikh has approved the creation of a dedicated fund of ‘Loss & Damages’ that will pay for the sufferings and impairments in all things concerned, undergone by a gamut of unprivileged nations because of the global temperature rise led by the industrialized nations.
What are these damages and how are they classified?
This discussion at the world forum depicts a threatening narrative that climate change is negatively affecting our ecosystems and infrastructures throwing them to space beyond repair, and people’s health and livelihoods beyond despair.
The term Loss and Damage has two connotations: the ‘loss and damage’ with small “l” and “d” denotes the manifestation of climate change impacts which could not be tamed by adaptation or mitigation efforts.
Whereas the term ‘Loss and Damage’ with capital “L” and “D” describes the policies or plans which can be made in order to curb the ‘loss and damage’, like is being used for the recent climate negotiations and its related politics.
While there exists no internationally agreed definition for ‘loss and damage’, these are the selective impacts of climate change which are deemed to no longer be avoidable by mitigation i.e., through corrective actions like limiting greenhouse gases emissions, afforestation, restoration etc., or by adaptation i.e., modifying the way humans function to create buffers against climate change impacts.
This demand by most vulnerable nations has sustained almost three decades (first raised in 1991), much aligned with the existence of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its own birthchild Conferences of Parties (COP).
COP19 saw the establishment of ‘Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss & Damage’ that facilitates dialogue, closes the existing knowledge gaps and provides action for the most vulnerable countries.
Under further strengthening, countries conceded at COP 25 in 2019 to institutionalize the Santiago Network aiming to connect developing countries for the technical assistance required to find, prepare and work on loss and damage solutions (still under discussion).
Article 8 of the Paris agreement states: “Parties recognize the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change” but even that revolutionary document did not extend and guarantee the compensation responsibility to be carried by the developed nations of the world.
It is, however, to note that the Paris Agreement formulated in 2015 does not prohibit or contain any country from seeking compensation for loss and damage outside of the purview of UN and a few countries are already doing so.
Like Tuvalu (island nation in the Pacific) in 2021 and Antigua and Barbuda (in the Caribbean) formed a Commission for Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, so that one could legally claim loss and damage in the international courts.
Now at COP27, a round-about figure of US$ 5.8-5.9 trillion till 2030 has been made.
Another commitment for a “Transition Committee” to be created by March 2023, has promised more detailed upcoming proposals to be finalized in the next COP.
Why the need for such a mechanism?
Many of these questioning vulnerable nations re-iterated that they want a ‘new and additional’ loss and damage funding instead of the one drawn out of existing fund mechanisms for climate change mitigation, adaptation and consequent humanitarian rehabilitation.
Also, according to the L&D document, this fund shall not be exclusively dependent on government or public money akin to the other climate funding mechanisms that involves an interoperability between various agencies to raise finances.
This has facilitated but also weakened the cause for Climate financing because the concerned Governments can now shed their responsibility in a similar light.
Additionally, current finance foundations like the Green Climate Fund have no provisions for non-economic loss and damage incurred by the vulnerable nations or communities, least considered financing the events with slow progress such as melting glaciers, permafrost thawing, sea level rise etc.
The loss and damage being discussed has sufficiently included these slow-onset impacts which are proving to be equally damaging than the ones with rapid onset.
A Kenya based research was apt to conclude that if households are made to pay for the loss and damage, they are possibly forced to sell their existing productive assets like lands & livestock, pull out their children from school, reducing their remnant resilience against any future shocks.
Can the loss and damage be accurately quantified?
This amount of loss and damage is very difficult to assess and calculate because of its vast extent and nature.
Unfortunately, even without an accurate analysis, this loss and damage is already happening widely with almost no essence of compensation, insurance or payment, especially in climate-stricken countries. Even worse is that it is bound to just worsen with increasing temperatures, reducing albedo or a desperate shift to fossils along with the renewables as feared.
Nature is even complicating things further, with these little changes.
The migratory habits of Tuna in the Pacific Ocean are facing alterations because of ocean warming, causing further enormous economic impact on small island fishing-dependent states whose food supplies and economies are drying up fast.
As per a few estimations, $140 million loss on an average government revenue per year is already happening.
It is believed that the economies of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries called V20 have lost a staggering $525 billion in the last 2 decades. The cumulative loss and damage amount is expected to become at least $1 trillion by 2050.
The V20’s parent organisation called Climate Vulnerable Forum called out for the COP27 to demand a special report on loss and damage to be formulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
What are the grievances with the recently added ‘loss and damage’ mechanism?
Apart from the much-celebrated establishment of the fund, there is little clarity on the ways it shall function, how it will be set up, which countries will pay and how much, large developing economies (i.e. economies emitting now) to be a part or just the developed ones (i.e. emitted hugely in past) contributing etc.
Commitments have flown in from Scotland and Belgium to add to the fund.
With unknown details, there is always space for little demons to creep in. The Mitigation Workplan of COP27 has preferred to call for transition to “low-emission energy sources” rather than green energy or renewables itself. This is treacherous already!
Another concern that encircled the summit in particular has been about lowering down the guards for our existing ambitions on mitigation, that is, absolutely no further promises for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions were made than what got engraved with COP26 in Glasgow.
This stagnation came even when this year’s Roundtable opened with a recent Oct 2022 published Report by UN Climate Change highlighting the current disturbing trends and needs to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degree C.
A researcher at India’s The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) explains the urge: “Finance was uppermost on everyone’s minds and critical need of the hour but nothing substantively new emerged. No other concrete measures were carved out for a safer world. Still, we moved, only an inch at a time when the need was for jumps of several dozen feet.”
The same Report indicated a slight improvement in total emissions post the COP26 targets, decreasing from 13.7 percent increment in emissions and its continuation post 2030 to just 10.6 percent till 2030 and then levelling off.
However, this is apparently different from the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC (AR6) where these global emissions will peak by 2025 and then will decline at a rate of 43 percent by 2030.
What’s true and what’s not is utterly confusing, appropriation science dealing in these details is surely the one to evolve soon. But we know we need urgency and panic to begin with.
This is one Earth and it will survive our fall but we won’t!