The UN Climate Conference Report: Funding for Climate Change Predictions in Developing Countries isn’t Insufficient Compared to the Pakistan Floods or Hurricane Ian in October 2005

The UN’s Climate Change Conference urged the developed countries to double their funding for adaptation by 2025, from the current levels. However, the UN says even that amount of money would be insufficient to address the needs that exist in developing nations to prepare for climate risk.

Even though they’re responsible for a very small share of greenhouse gasses that cause temperatures to rise, the world’s poorest countries have already been hit hard by the impacts of global warming. The UN report says there are “mounting and ever-increasing climate risks” after the floods in Pakistan that killed 1500 people.

“Political will is needed to increase adaptation investments and outcomes”, Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme wrote in a foreword to the report.

She said that we need to get ahead of the game if we aren’t to spend the coming decades in emergency response mode.

The UN published the report days before its annual climate conference starts in Egypt. In a separate report published last week, the UN said the world isn’t cutting greenhouse gas emissions nearly enough to avoid potentially catastrophic sea level rise and other global dangers.

The UN climate negotiations scheduled to begin over the weekend in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh are the 27th Conference of the Parties, or COP27. They are expected to focus on efforts to boost the amount of money that’s available to deal with climate change, especially in developing countries.

“The discourse needs to be raised significantly, the level of ambition, so that you can actually continue to do what you’re doing on mitigation even more, but you at the same time meet the adaptation needs,” says Mafalda Duarte, CEO of Climate Investment Funds, which works with development banks like the World Bank to provide funding to developing countries on favorable terms.

The fact that the climate crisis is supercharging weather around the world is clear. Look no farther than the deadly floods in Pakistan this summer or Hurricane Ian in Florida this September. Disasters are getting more expensive because they’re becoming more intense as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and swamp the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses.

The world is exposed to potential risks due to failing to spend money on preparing for climate change. Analysts say that the risks could include armed conflicts, refugee crises, and disruptions in financial markets.

When it comes to climate, an investment across borders in other places is a domestic investment, which is what we have to change.

John D. Sutter has won multiple awards for his work, including the IRE Award and the Livingston Award. He recently was appointed the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. There is more opinion at CNN.

Vanuatu is an ambassador to UN climate negotiators and should be an insurance pool for climate loss-and-damage payments

There should be an “insurance pool … used to compensate the most vulnerable small island and low-lying coastal developing countries for loss and damage resulting from sea level rise,” Vanuatu’s ambassador, Robert Van Lierop, proposed to United Nations climate negotiators, according to a 2019 article in the journal “Climate Policy.”

At the time, Vanuatu – on behalf of an alliance of small-island states – argued quite reasonably that polluters should pay for the costs of their pollution.

Excuses and stall tactics should be seen clearly in the other arguments against loss-and-damage payments. The harm is undeniable at this point, as is the cause. According to a report, these climate losses will amount to $1 trillion per year by the end of the century.

After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. It is clear that the losses to territory, culture, life and property should be taken responsibility for by the polluter.

While those efforts should be supported, the fair thing is for rich countries to impose taxes on fossil fuel profits. That is possible as part of the UN Climate negotiations.

The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/opinions/cop27-climate-loss-and-damage-vanuatu-sutter/index.html

Does the fossil fuel industry really care about climate change? The Peruvian farmer’s lawsuit against a German oil and gas company over a melting glacier

Many different arguments against action have been taken in the past. The most laughable, in retrospect, is that this was a problem for the future rather than the present.

It has been decades in the making, but it may feel like a new phenomenon. A deadly heat wave in Europe in 2003 was linked to human-caused warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.

Both urgent and numbing are the feelings of the onslaught of heat waves, fires, and storms. Humans have been burning fossil fuels for as long as we can remember, so we have made the planet more dangerous.

The oil and gas industry has raked in $2.8 billion per day in profits over the last 50 years, according to a recent analysis. The loss and damage collaboration supported a recent report titled, “The Cost of Delay,” which shows more than $30 trillion in profit for fossil fuel companies between 2000 and 2019.

Short of international efforts to fund a loss-and-damage process, countries and individuals are turning to the courts. A Peruvian farmer, for example, is suing a German fossil fuel company over a melting glacier that threatens his home and farm. The suit, filed in 2015, according to news reports, claims the German company, RWE, should be liable for its proportion of the damages, in line with the proportion of global fossil fuel pollution it has created. (RWE is contesting the lawsuit and says it should not be held responsible for the damage.)

And in 2021, Tuvalu and other countries formed the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law. The aim is to find out if there’s a claim in international courts.

“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. “We want to force them to respond in a court of law.”