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In an interminable plenary session, which continued at the close of this note, COP 27 reached a historic agreement by approving, after long tug-of-war, the creation of a fund to finance “loss and damage” in underdeveloped countries ” particularly vulnerable” to the impacts of the climate crisis. This was a key demand of the poor nations, which called out the rich countries for being largely responsible for global warming.
historical.
This is how, literally, many delegates described the decision to create a fund to compensate the most vulnerable nations in the face of the climate emergency, which was reached on Sunday morning in the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh, where the COP 27, the UN climate conference.
The fund had been at the center of disputes at the conference, with the least developed nations and most affected by global warming demanding that the rich countries of the North compensate them for being the main causes of the climate emergency, while they resisted during much of the conference to accept it. However, in the end, consensus was reached around the creation of the fund… although the plenary of the conference, at the time of writing this note, had not yet reached a complete agreement as differences persisted regarding what to include and what not in efforts to reduce harmful emissions.
This first agreement is a great triumph for the poorest nations, which have long demanded “reparations” for being the most affected by hurricanes, floods, storms, heat waves and famines that they rightly allege are caused by the countries that most emissions generate, industrialized nations.
“This is how our 30-year journey is finally, we hope, coming to fruition today,” said Pakistan’s Climate Change Minister Sherry Reman, whose country was devastated by recent flooding.
“Loss and damage is a way of recognizing past damage and compensating for that past damage,” said climate scientist Justin Mankin. However, it is one thing to agree to the creation of a fund and another for it to receive the money. We must not forget precedents such as the 2009 agreement in which industrialized countries pledged to invest 100,000 million dollars a year in helping the poorest nations to make their energy transition -an investment goal that today, almost three decades later , is far from being fulfilled.
The most developed countries and multilateral institutions will initially contribute to the fund, but the discussion on the contribution of large economies -which are major polluters- such as China, is still open, a requirement of the United States and the European Union, which consider that this nation and other large emitters of greenhouse gases, which are classified as ‘developing countries’, should contribute to the fund.
A complete agreement, however, had not been reached at the time of writing this note, when the plenary continued to be sharply divided over fossil fuels. “Some of us are trying to say that we must keep global warming below 1.5 degrees (Celsius) and that requires action. We must reduce our use of fossil fuels, for example. But there is a fossil fuel lobby trying to block any text we produce,” Norwegian Climate Change Minister Espen Barth Eide told the AP, illustrating the latest impasse the conference was trying to overcome.
Indeed, countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia or Nigeria are strongly opposed to the proposals for the progressive elimination not only of coal (agreed last year) but also of oil and gas.
There is also discussion around what is called mitigation, since some countries have tried to introduce in the final text a goal of limiting global warming of 2 degrees Celsius, while others consider that a setback compared to COP 26, in Glasgow, last year, which determined to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
For now, COP 27 has reached an important agreement with the creation of the fund to compensate losses and damages. A whole step forward… that remains to be seen how it materializes in practice and within how long. And, meanwhile, the delegates, tired and dawn, continued trying to reach the last agreements to close the great United Nations climate conference.
With AP and Reuters
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