The European Union has proposed a mechanism for financing losses and damage for the most vulnerable countries, in exchange for a commitment to gradually abandon fossil fuels.
by Audrey Garric (Charm El-Cheikh (Egypt), Special Envoy)
This is the term we hear in all the aisles of the conference center, in the negotiation rooms as in the press points. And the one who risks bogging the COP27. The burning file of “losses and damage”, this irreversible damage caused by the climate crisis, remained the stumbling block of the World Conference on the Climate of Charm El-Cheikh (Egypt), a few hours before its official closure, planned Friday November 18.
Thursday, developing countries wanted to show a united front on this subject, which sums up inequalities in the face of global warming. The southern states are the hardest struck by the impacts of hurricanes, droughts or the rise of waters, when they have contributed the least to global warming. During a common press conference, they asked, once again, the creation of a specific financing mechanism dedicated to “losses and damage”, and recalled that it should intervene at this conference, and no later . “Delaying climate justice amounts to denying climate justice,” warned Sherry Rehman, the Pakistani Minister of Climate Change, whose country presidency of the powerful negotiation group G77 + China, which represents 134 countries, or 80 % of the ‘Humanity.
“We cannot drop them”
“The most vulnerable countries, responsible on the one hand tiny part of greenhouse gas emissions, cannot afford to get up from the climatic disasters which strike them and hamper their development. We cannot Drop “, explains Madeleine Diouf Sarr, head of the division on climate change at the Ministry of the Environment of Senegal and president of the group of the least advanced countries, which represents 46 states (Bangladesh, Nepal, etc.). “It is the countries that have polluted to pay,” said Molwyn Joseph, Minister of the Environment of the Caribbean Island of Antigua-et-Barbuda. A “moral obligation”, more than solidarity.
For thirty years, rich countries, historically responsible for climate change, have continued to block this request for financial assistance, fearing that it would lead to legal proceedings and larger compensation requests. The COP26 of Glasgow, in 2021, had only decided to create a two -year “dialogue” on the issue. But after a summer of climatic disasters, which notably ravaged Pakistan, the debate is now impossible to avoid and the developing countries have obtained, for the first time, the registration of “losses and damage” at the official agenda of Climate negotiations.
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