UN climate negotiations on Sunday offered a sliver of hope and "solidarity" for developing countries battered by increasingly costly impacts of global warming, in agreeing to discuss the thorny issue of money for "loss and damage".
Countries least responsible for planet-heating emissions — but hardest hit by an onslaught of weather extremes — have been ramping up the pressure on wealthy polluting nations to provide financial help for accelerating damages.
But in a sign of how contentious the issue is among richer nations fearful of open-ended climate liability, the issue was only added to the formal agenda to the UN's COP27 climate summit in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh after two days of last-ditch negotiations.
This "reflects a sense of solidarity and empathy for the suffering of the victims of climate induced disasters," Egypt's Sameh Shoukry, the COP27 president, said to applause.
At last year's UN summit in Glasgow, the European Union and the United States rejected calls for a separate financial mechanism.
Instead, negotiators agreed to start a "dialogue" extending through 2024 on financial compensation.
The issue has grown ever more urgent in recent months as nations were slammed by a crescendo of disasters, such as the massive flooding that put a third of Pakistan under water in August.
– 'Lives are being lost' –
Senegal's Madeleine Diouf Sarr, who represents the Least Developed Countries negotiating bloc, said climate action across the board had been far too slow.
"Lives are being lost. Climate change is causing irreversible loss and damage, and our people carry the greatest cost," she said, adding that an agreement on funding arrangements must be reached in Egypt.
Appeals for more money are bolstered by a field known as event attribution science, which now makes it possible to measure how much global warming increases the likelihood or intensity of an individual cyclone, heat wave, drought or heavy rain event.
"Today, countries cleared an historic first hurdle toward acknowledging and answering the call for financing to address increasingly severe losses and damages," said Ani Dasgupta, head of the World Resources Institute, a climate policy think tank.
But he said that getting negotiators to agree to discuss the issue was only an initial step.
"We still have a marathon ahead of us before countries iron out a formal decision on this central issue for CO27," he said.
Wrangling over loss and damage has unfolded against the backdrop of an unmet promise by rich nations to provide $100 billion a year starting in 2020 to help the developing world green their economies and anticipate future impacts, called "adaptation" in UN climate lingo.
That funding goal is still $17 billion dollars short. Rich nations have vowed to hit the target by the end of 2023, but observers say the issue has severely undermined trust.
The UN Environment Programme has said the goal — first set in 2009 — has not kept up with reality, and estimates that funding to build resilience to future climate threats should be up to 10 times higher.
– 'Words to actions' –
Meanwhile, countries are far off track to reach the Paris deal goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The UN says the world is currently heading to 2.8C of warming, or a still-catastrophic 2.4C even if all national pledges under the Paris treaty are fulfilled.
Depending on how deeply the world slashes carbon pollution, loss and damage from climate change could cost developing countries $290 to 580 billion a year by 2030, reaching $1 trillion to 1.8 trillion in 2050, according to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London.
The World Bank has estimated the Pakistan floods alone caused $30 billion in damages and economic loss. Millions of people were displaced and two million homes destroyed.
Simon Stiell, the UN's climate change executive secretary, said vulnerable countries are "tired" and "frustrated".
"Here in Sharm el-Sheikh we have a duty to speed up our international efforts and turn words into action to catch up with their lived experience," he said.
Up to now, poor countries have had scant leverage in the UN wrangle over money. But as climate damages multiply, patience is wearing thin.
The AOSIS negotiating block of small island nations told AFP that they would like to see the details for a dedicated loss-and-damage fund worked out within a year.
"There's not enough support for us to even to begin to prepare for the loss and damage that we are expected to face," said AOSIS lead negotiator on climate finance Michai Robertson.
UN summit warns against climate backsliding, hopeful on financing
Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt (AFP) Nov 6, 2022 –
The UN's COP27 climate summit kicked off Sunday in Egypt with warnings against backsliding on efforts to cut emissions and calls for rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme weather disasters.
An alarming UN report said the past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, with an acceleration in sea level rise, glacier melt, heatwaves and other climate indicators.
"As COP27 gets underway, our planet is sending a distress signal," UN chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement, calling the report a "chronicle of climate chaos".
Just in the past few months, floods devastated Pakistan and Nigeria, droughts worsened in Africa and the United States, cyclones whipped the Caribbean, and unprecedented heatwaves seared three continents.
The conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh also comes against the backdrop of Russia's war on Ukraine, an energy crunch, soaring inflation and the lingering effects from the Covid-19 pandemic.
But Simon Stiell, the UN's climate change executive secretary, said he would not be a "custodian of backsliding" on the goal of slashing greenhouse emissions 45 percent by 2030 to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above late 19th-century levels.
"We will be holding people to account, be they presidents, prime ministers, CEOs," Stiell said as the 13-day summit opened.
"The heart of implementation is everybody everywhere in the world every single day doing everything they possibly can to address the climate crisis," he said, noting that only 29 of 194 nations have presented improved plans as called for at COP26 in Glasgow last year.
Current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and the Earth's surface heat up 2.8C, according to findings unveiled last week.
Promises made under the 2015 Paris Agreement would, if kept, only shave off a few tenths of a degree.
Britain's Alok Sharma, who handed the COP presidency to Egypt, said that while world leaders have faced "competing priorities" this year, "inaction is myopic and can only defer climate catastrophe."
"How many more wake-up calls does the world — and world leaders — actually need?" he said.
– 'Loss and damage' –
The COP27 summit will focus like never before on money — a major sticking point that has soured relations between countries that got rich burning fossil fuels and the poorer ones suffering from the worst consequences of climate change.
The United States and the European Union — fearful of creating an open-ended reparations framework — have dragged their feet and challenged the need for a separate funding stream.
After two days of intense pre-summit negotiations, delegates agreed on Sunday to put the "loss and damage" issue on the COP27 agenda, a first step towards what are sure to be difficult discussions.
Stiell said inclusion of loss and damage on the agenda after three decades of debate on the issue showed progress.
"The fact that it is there as a substantive agenda item I believe bodes well," he told reporters.
COP27 president Sameh Shoukry of Egypt said it would be unproductive to speculate on what outcome the negotiations will lead to, "but certainly everybody is hopeful."
"Anything that we do effectively has to be on the basis of our common efforts and that we leave no one behind," he said.
Shoukry also noted that rich nations have not fulfilled a separate pledge to deliver $100 billion per year to help developing countries green their economies and build resilience against future climate change.
He lamented that most climate financing is based on loans.
"We do not have the luxury to continue this way. We have to change our approaches to this existential threat," he said.
– US-China tensions –
After the first day of talks, some 110 world leaders will join the summit on Monday and Tuesday.
The most conspicuous no-show will be China's Xi Jinping, whose leadership was renewed last month at a Communist Party Congress.
US President Joe Biden has said he will come, but only after legislative elections on Tuesday that could see either or both houses of Congress fall into the hands of Republicans hostile to international action on climate change.
Cooperation between the United States and China — the world's two largest economies and carbon polluters — has been crucial to rare breakthroughs in the nearly 30-year saga of UN climate talks, including the 2015 Paris Agreement.
But Sino-US relations have sunk to a 40-year low after a visit to Taiwan by House leader Nancy Pelosi and a US ban on the sale of high-level chip technology to China, leaving the outcome of COP27 in doubt.
A meeting between Xi and Biden at the G20 summit in Bali days before the UN climate meeting ends, if it happens, could be decisive.
One bright spot at COP27 will be the arrival of Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose campaign vowed to protect the Amazon and reverse the extractive policies of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro.
