The Land & Climate Podcast
The Land & Climate Podcast
Why has international diplomacy failed on climate loss and damage?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
As COP27 begins in Egypt following historic floods in Pakistan and a summer of international droughts, will this finally be the year rich governments begin to take climate finance seriously?
Bertie speaks to Karim Ahmed about his recent white policy paper on loss and damage, which is being presented at COP27. Dr. Ahmed is a director of the Global Council for Science and the Environment, and a Professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center. He has previously had high level roles at NRDC, US Government departments, UN environmental bodies, and the World Bank.
Further reading from Dr. Ahmed:
- The Impact of Global Climate Change on Vulnerable Communities: Climate-Related Loss & Damage and Financial Reparations, a Policy White Paper (2022)
- Climate Justice, Humans Rights, and the Case for Reparations, Health and Human Rights Journal (2021)
- Why we need a Global Climate Reparations Fund, ELCI (2022)
- What is the financial cost of loss and damage from climate change?, ELCI (2022)
Find all our latest investigations, features and interviews at www.landclimate.org
Hello and welcome to the Economy, Land and Climate Podcast. My name is Bertie Harrison-Broninski, and today I'm talking to Dr. Karim Ahmed, a Director of the Global Council for Science and the Environment, and a Professor at University of Connecticut Health Center. As world leaders head to Egypt this week for COP27, we're going to be discussing climate finance, loss and damage, and reparations.
Karim:Today we have a mess, literally a mess, internationally speaking. And there are people asking what happens to the $100 billion a year that was promised 10 years ago? Where is that money?
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I began by asking Karim what we mean by the term 'loss and damage'.
Karim:What we're saying about loss and damage is not clear. It has been raised going back as far as 2007 during the COP meeting in Bali, the first time explicitly stated in the UN documentation. Then it was in 2013, the COP meeting in Warsaw development is known as the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage, where for the first time it was discussed and defined to some extent. But the definition of loss and damage has been very ambiguous, no one has a clear understanding of what it means, whether it means present damage, or future damage. The question of past damages doesn't even come up during the discussion. The UN has, after the adoption of the Warsaw International Mechanism, it was then embedded in the Paris treaty in 2015. Article Eight has a complete section on loss and damage where it attempted to define it. But unfortunately, the definition of loss and damage was left very vague. And to this day, no one fully understands what we mean by loss and damage in the context of climate change. What I can say about loss and damage is that the issue has been bandied around. Cop26 mentioned the fact that we still need to negotiate what we mean by it, and who's responsible for loss and damage. But it's been left very, very much up in the air. The NGO community have defined loss and damage as being the third leg. There's mitigation, there's adaptation, and now there's loss and damage. So let's just discuss what is covered under each one of these terms. Mitigation means the ability of a country to reduce its carbon emission, its carbon footprint, so to speak, by moving from fossil fuels to more renewable sources of energy. So that would be one definition for mitigation. And it's quite clear, there's no ambiguity about that. Adaptation means how you adapt to the damages of climate change. So those countries that for example build a seawall or they move low lying population to a high lying population. That's a form of adaptation. It does require financing, obviously. So that's what the two legs of the current UN approach to climate change has been up to now. And there's also a clear understanding of it. A corollary of adaptation is what we call building resilience, which means that how you deal with infrastructure, how you deal with the fact that you might have to get both the infrastructure in place, but also the mechanism by which you can deal with disasters when they occur. And so building resilience is kind of a broad term used by policymakers around the world. And it's as important as adaptation. So sometimes adaptation, resilience building, are mentioned in the same breath. Then comes loss and damage. So it's sort of like an orphan, it doesn't have a place. It's neither mitigation nor adaptation. It's something other than that. I have defined loss and damage in the context of adaptation and resilience. It is the amount of financing that needs to be done to build enough adaptation in countries that are most vulnerable, communities that are most vulnerable to climate change. They can in fact, adapt and build resilience from future impacts of climate change. But then I go on to define loss and damage in terms of past damages, and also present damage. So things like disaster management comes under loss and damage to some extent. So it's both past, present and future. It also includes the question of setting up an insurance program, which would be one where a country with major impacts could draw from. Today we have a mess, literally a mess, internationally speaking. And there are people'asking what happens to the $100 billion per year that was promised 10 years ago? Where is that money?' And I just saw an article I think in The Guardian just the other day about Somalia; it's facing a prolonged drought. And they're facing famine now. And they are asking'what happened to that money? Where can we apply for it?' And if you look at it carefully, you find that the one international multilateral agency that was set up some half a dozen years ago, the Global Green Fund, has only raised up to now over the last six years $10 billion altogether, not 100 billion dollars per year by any stretch. So then other people will say,'well, wait a minute. There are some private monies available here'. But they're all loans! None of them are grants. So people become even more indebted if they get money from banks, whether it's a regional bank or it's a private bank. So the question as I just mentioned, it's a complete mess. No one knows where the money is being raised. There's no mechanism setup. There's no accountability of how the money... And then OECD has a definition of financing for climate change in such a vague manner that everything can be put under the same umbrella. Until Oxfam came along and said, 'wait a minute, this isn't fair, this is not loss and damage. This is not the 100 billion dollars you had promised the developing countries'. No. It's not. It's a shambles. So what we need now is some kind of an international mechanism where everything is well defined; who's responsible which countries are required to put the money into this particular fund, and set up a bureaucracy that can actually handle the applications that come from different countries. Take Pakistan, for example, this summer. They suffered 33 million people being displaced. Pakistan has no place to go to find where assistantce would come in. It all depends upon the charitable instincts of those countries around the world that will provide some assistance and disaster management here. So we have nothing in place essentially. We have a piddly amount of money that's being allocated, and the countries that are suffering most are getting almost nothing.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:And just briefly, you're a coauthor of a white paper, policy paper about loss and damage ahead of COP27. Could you quickly tell us what you're trying to do with
Karim:The white paper that you referred to is a white paper that? that the Global Council for Science and the Environment will be presenting at the COP27th meeting that's happening this month in Egypt. And it really looks at the question of loss and damage in the context of climate reparations. Now that is a very controversial issue as you well know. Climate reparations is something that very few people would like to address at the moment because it places responsibility on those countries most involved in carbon emissions over time, going back to the industrial age. So that's not an issue that I think has been really raised even in the context of loss and damage. But we felt from a human rights and ethical perspective that unless you address the question of climate reparations squarely, first and foremost, all questions of loss and damage loses its context. There is no way to assign responsibility for who is going to have to pay the damages that have so far occurred. Also, it's the question of future damages. It's not just a question of past damage or present damage. It's also future. So unless there's an international mechanism in place that can address this issue, nothing is going to be solved, and developing countries and those in the south that are most affected will continue to be affected without any compensation for the damages that have occurred. So it became a central issue. And it's something that was brought up at the Glasgow COP26 meeting, where it was again deferred. It's hopefully going to be discussed this year as there's some reason to believe that it may not be discussed to the point of satisfaction of those countries that are raising this issue. It's still a new issue to some extent. The question of climate reparation is very central to a question of loss and damage, you cannot avoid it. Yet developed countries have found every way to avoid discussing these issues. Even the question of loss and damage has been postponed for a long time.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:You've said that this multilateral agency has provided about $10 billion in total, when countries suffering from these impacts were promised 100 billion a year. I know that you've done a little bit of work trying to calculate some of the costs to date of loss and damage. Could you give us a sense of the scale of that? I know it's hard to be too detailed about it.
Karim:We looked at the data that was collected by Germanwatch the last 20 years. And we looked at those countries that were most impacted. We looked at low income and middle low income countries and going back to the late 1990s to about 2017. And what we found is when you add all the estimated damages that's occurred in those countries it amounts to about$593 billion itself. So that is the number that we have cited as being past damage that have occurred in many of the countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and Latin America. So that is just what happened in the past. Now look into the future now, between now and 2030, 2040, another 20 years from now. This will just exponentially increase because the trajectory or what we call the business as usual trajectory shows that things are not going to improve. There's been a recent UN report that points out that they're not going to be able to reach the 1.5 degrees celsius target of the Paris treaty. So you can use this as your baseline and say, 'Okay, what's going to be the future?' Yes, twofold more, threefold more? It is going to be in trillions of dollars, and where's the money gonna come from? And who's responsible? No mechanism in place, no money available! Everyone is going to be left to their own devices, then where are the people who are affected are going to go? And that's the reason why we emphasise in our white paper, the importance of understanding the question of global security. The Zurich Insurance Group has now estimated - or projected - 1.2 billion was their estimate of environmental refugees from climate change by mid century. Of course, the UN, the World Bank, has estimated something in the order of about 140 million refugees but it all depends upon how you define refugees here. The UN has a different definition of environmental refugees than what others have used. So this would pose a huge issue for countries in the north. And without addressing the issue or at least dealing with the issue upfront saying'okay $1 spent now will save us$10 10 years from now', you will see not only that you have to spend more money, you will see a huge problem at your borders. Where are people from Africa going to move to? They're going to move to the Mediterranean countries, northwards. Where are people from Central America going to move to? It's already happening. It's not like it's not happening. And all those countries have suffered tremendous xenophobia. So they have don't have a very pleasant future to look forward to Bertie, I'm sorry to say.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:And just from memory, that figure that you said a minute ago that 500 billion from Germanwatch, that's just looking at the immediate effects of disasters and kind of crisis events, right? It's not taking into account the kind of long term health impacts and some of those other slowly accruing costs.
Karim:The immediate. All the other damages that have occurred and long term consequences are not factored in there at all; peoples lost jobs, people's chronic health problems that are associated with it, loss of educational opportunity, all of that is not accounted for in that statistic.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I want to come back to what you were saying about climate displacement or migration. But before we do that, why has this been so problematic? Why has there been such a failure to deal with this? You said that these multilateral agencies were set up, there were pledges made about the 100 billion dollars, people have been talking about it since the '90s at intergovernmental level, you've said that. So what why hasn't it worked? I mean, what are some of the reasons?
Karim:The way to look at it is that they haven't set up any international mechanism. And there are no bilateral agencies that are dedicated to working on loss and damage or whatever you want to call it, assisting them, humanitarian assistance programs on climate change. There's no mechanism in place. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. Then the amount of money that's being funneled into it mostly come in forms of loans from banks, both private banks and multilateral banks. The United Nations has two programs to deal with climate change impacts. One is the Global Environmental Facility. The last 20 years, if you look at the amount of money they have put into these programs, it comes to about a billion dollars per year average. Green Fund was set up about half a dozen years ago and it's been miserably unable to raise money from those countries that are responsible for climate change impacts. So raised about$10 billion, that's pledged money, that's not even money they have received so far. Countries like United States haven't even paid the remaining pledges they made up to now. So they have very little money and then half that money goes for mitigation. Now, what can these kinds of ill conceived mitigation projects do in a country that's, you know, dealing with issues of adaptation and building resilience? That's where the money should be going. Even that little amount of money has been distributed is a huge bureaucracy setup. It is extraordinarily difficult to apply for money and to get it. Someone once said that most of the money are going to international consultants now. They're not going for any you know, infrastructure projects and so forth. So that's how the money has been squandered.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:So moving on to climate displacement and refugees. How much of a difference do you think this finance can make if 1.5 is now inevitable to some extent or higher? What's the kind of scale of impact that you think that funding for adaptation could have in terms of protecting populations from having to move as the climate gets worse?
Karim:That's a very good question and someone has to do a very in depth study. But you know that the interesting thing is, last year, the White House issued a report on this very question, in which I was quite heartened to learn that they have taken this issue quite seriously. Over the years, when we have been working with the US government, one of the agencies most concerned about environmental refugees has been the Pentagon, the Defense Department, because they have always recognized this from the beginning. This is a global security issue. It's a national and global security issue. What the White House report states is that the current funding for dealing with this issue is completely inadequate. They really have pointed out there is a need for a greater deal of assistance here. And that United States can provide bold leadership in this arena, and that they can leverage their current activities to be more more fruitful in dealing with this issue. And then they believe that there's a need for increased funding in building resilience. It's very important that someone take a lead role here. And if the White House, along with its national security advisors are moving in the right direction, the world should follow them.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:Do you expect the US to take findings of that paper and that document to COP27 and make these arguments? Are you hopeful about that?
Karim:I'm hoping it will. So far, the US State Department has shown no interest to deal with the question of climate reparations. So my understanding is that they are quite adamant about not bringing that up. They're quite adamant in not setting up a new international mechanism at the present moment. That's the US State Department. Whether the White House and the State Department are coordinating their activities, I don't know. But I hope that they will eventually do that because the State Department does take directions from the White House and from the National Security Office. So hopefully, that will happen. But the question is how and when? And are they willing to state that in an international forum? Are they quietly going to implement new programs? Yeah, I don't know. But I think that the best of effort for organisations like ours is to work with those countries of the world that understand the climate issues as a global security issue. That's the best leverage we have right now. Because look around the world, what's happening politically, more and more countries are electing parties that are trying to keep migrants out of their borders, starting with your country. Brexit was a form of xenophobia. And what happened in Italy and Sweden recently, countries you didn't expect that to happen in, it's happening. Move yourself 10 years from now, and ask yourself, when people are really at your borders, there's no place for them to go, how are you going to deal with it? You have to do something proactively now, in order for that not to happen. You close your borders completely, then where are these people are going to go?
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:We had the journalist Sonia Shah on the podcast a while ago, and she, as I understood it kind of sees climate displacement as an inevitability at this point, and thinks that governments need to be working to reframe the way that they and the public view immigration to try and get rid of that kind of, I guess, often populist right, far right, view of it, and see it as a solution and not an issue to many of the problems that the world faces going forward. What would you think about that kind of argument? And do you think that maybe based on what you just said, that's a less kind of politically sensible strategy than trying to play to the fears of immigration in order to get the money?
Karim:Well, I think first of all, the United Nations has to redefine what they mean by a refugee. According to them, a refugee is someone who's affected by some local conflict, or some local issues that have displaced the population to move from one region of the world to another. So let's say refugees come out of Syria. But what they fail to understand is the local problems in some parts of the world, like Syria itself, was caused by prolonged drought in the area there. Six year drought in Syria. So you can also say that 'look, part of the reasons why you have such conflict in some parts of the Middle East is because of climate change itself'. They broadened the definition and people are displaced, to put them in two different categories. One is environmental refugees, they don't even use that term, just displaced individuals. And those that are refugees that need immediate help, by setting up UN refugee camps and provide them with assistance. I think the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is beginning to understand that. They have issued this recent report using a more inclusive definition for displaced people. So that is the first place that needs to happen, then I think the rest of the world has to follow their lead on this issue. That they understand that when someone is at the border, they don't just allow them because they are suffering from political persecution, let's say, or that you give them a political asylum based upon that, that you have a much more liberal definition of those who are at your border, and they need to be given assistance. But what will be far better is to give assistance where they are actually living right now. So if people are suffering from drought in some parts of the world, they need assistance now, not wait 10 years or five years from now, when they are all moving into your region of the world. That's not the right way to do it, deal with it. And you will be able to deal with the issue upfront, instead of having to do it when the emergencies arise. So I think it's very important for people to think in those terms now, not 10 years from now.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:Going on to kind of reparations and some of the other topics you were discussing earlier. Could you walk us through what we mean by reparations and why certain countries and stakeholders do kind of owe more when we think about climate change, and perhaps which actors are most responsible?
Karim:In terms of trying to understand climate reparations, you have to first assign or at least collect enough information about the amount of carbon emission using carbon dioxide as your main greenhouse gas. And the studies that have been done so far have shown that United States is responsible for about a quarter of all the carbon emissions that have occurred since, let's say the mid 19th century, and followed by the 28 countries that belong to the European Union, which included UK when the analysis was done. And so between the two of them, North America, which would include the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and if you include the 28 countries of the European Union, they make up well over half the amount of carbon emissions. If you're trying to assign responsibility, right, you would use at least that as your first step in trying to understand the responsibility. Of course, United States being the largest. Then I think you need to take into account those countries that are presently putting the most amount of carbon dioxide in the air. And in that case, China is number one, followed by United States. So you have to use some formula, this combination of current emissions and historical cumulative emissions as your basis for assigning responsibility.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:You said earlier that the US has been very hesitant to kind of discuss reparations publicly and that, as you said, there's plenty of far right governments around the world that would see this as a very contentious issue that they probably wouldn't touch at the moment. How do we move past that? How do we kind of get some political leverage behind this issue?
Karim:Two things. One is to understand the global security issue on the one hand, and make people understand what this means by delaying your action now, you're going to have a bigger problem 10 years from now. I think that's your strongest suit. But that requires a different kind of analysis. And then also dealing with the humanitarian disasters that are happening around the world, that what happened this year and in say, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and countries like that. And once the people begin to realise that this is an issue that requires immediate attention, people will probably pay more attention and understand that they have... let's take one one issue right off the bat. United States when it comes to Overseas Development Assistance, the United States in absolute terms is the largest donor country. However, seen in relationship to its GDP, its economy, it doesn't meet the test. The OECD guidelines have always been 0.7% of the world's gross national income. And many Scandinavian countries meet that 0.7%. United States is among the lowest amongst the developed countries, at 0.18%. So while they are providing a fair amount because of their large economy and their annual budget, they do provide overseas development funds that are, you might say, in absolute terms very generous, it's not! So United States has a lot of ground cover, if they really believe in what the White House stated as a global security issue, providing more more generously, and setting up an international mechanism that can actually give them some way of funneling that money and also making sure that money is properly used. It doesn't end in some lack of governance, many of the developing countries have right now. So if you could improve governance in those receiving countries, and you provide a mechanism, international, both multilateral and bilateral mechanism, they can coordinate financing, transfer of technologies, the building capacity, people can work on these issues effectively. So those are the kinds of things that needs to be done to make this into an effective program. And it's not out of the realm of possibility doing it, the fact that we can even talk about it right now, you know, in abstract terms means that the framework is available, you have the UN framework for climate change already in place, you have FCCC, they could probably take care of this issue. But until you set it up, and get all the other financing institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the regional development banks all involved in this, nothing is gonna happen.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:And you've actually proposed a mechanism in a paper that you coauthored, the Global Climate Reparations Fund. One thing that I found interesting
Karim:That would be the kind of the concept we have of setting up a fund that's dedicated to climate reparations. But you first have to accept the concept that there is need for reparations here to begin with. Once you've accepted that, then about your proposal was that it integrated kind of corporate you can set up such an international mechanism. We just proposed a conceptual framework for doing something like that. The details have to be worked out by people who understand international finance mechanisms much better than we have in our responsibility as well as governmental responsibility to paper. But nevertheless, that concept has to be discussed and brought into the open to set it up and not set up some small little fund like the current Global Green Fund, which is hardly successful. pay. Could you say a little bit about that perhaps? I mean, how do you juggle that, and which kind of companies would be involved? It would not be very easy to figure this all out, because the formula gets more and more complicated when you bring in the private sector. But you have a lot of petrochemical companies, I'm thinking the oil and gas industry, that have been responsible for it. So in our report you can see we have shown the kind of profit margins that they have made over over time, which includes not only European and United States companies, but also includes many Middle East companies, companies in China and India, they have also amassed quite a large amount of profit over time, and they are also responsible to a certain extent, to the carbon emission we see. So that would also be included in the Climate Reparations Fund. So you get both the private and public sector all responsible for climate emissions over time, be included in the funding mechanism.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I wanted to ask you a little bit before you go about COP27. What are your expectations? What are your worries? And perhaps in a kind of realistic best case scenario what would happen around this issue at COP27.
Karim:The best case scenario would be that the question of loss and damage is taken seriously by the representatives attending COP27. That the issue is no longer going to be left vaguely defined, or left to another COP meeting in the future. Of course, the details have to be worked out. But at least they will make a commitment that they are going to set up an international financing mechanism. That's the first step. Once that that has been made, and that they understand that the current mechanism they have in place is a complete failure, then we have the basis for hope that the next few meetings that the United Nations will hold will bring about the setting up of such a mechanism, that you will have a blueprint. So the best thing that can happen from the meeting in Egypt this November would be an agreement that said to set up an international mechanism that includes financing for loss and damage, it would include some kind of humanitarian assistance program that can do work in a very short order, a program for setting up an insurance program that would have a way of distributing the actual cost of future loss and damage in place and a mechanism, a bureaucracy, that can handle these matters in an efficient manner and they are able to raise the funds that are needed for this activity. So that at least should be set up in principle. All built upon what was already there in the Article Eight of the Paris treaty, for example. Article Eight also talks about slow onset events should be also be taken into account, not just current loss and damage but things like sea level rise or chronic diseases that might occur as time goes by. And all of that should be taken into account in setting up such an international mechanism.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:Have you heard any indications that those discussions might happen?
Karim:No, I haven't, and there was also a question back in the summer, whether or not loss and damage was going to even be put on the agenda for this upcoming conference. I think the latest I've heard is that it is going to be there. I think the host country Egypt is interested in it. Pakistan, being the chair of the group of 77, which is a group of people that represent developing countries, will provide some leadership there, how much I don't really know. I'll been having a chance to speak to some people in the Pakistan delegation pretty soon so I'll find out a little more on that. But basically, I think that this issue, this item will be brought up. Bertie, you've got to do a lot of preparatory work before you show up at any of these conferences. And you have to have a lot of staff involvement in this. I don't think I've seen anything that looks remotely like what I was just talking about. Have they set up some kind of a proposal that they can debate about at the COP meeting? I'm hoping that the basis for setting up such a report will be at least agreed in principle at the COP27 meeting upon which they'll be given the mandate, UNFCCC will be given the mandate, to develop such a report to bring to subsequent meetings. It's not going to happen overnight. But the fact that they're thinking in the right direction, that would be my best case scenario. They're thinking about this seriously, and they want to do something about it. And the White House is willing to push it. On their agenda, they bring up the question of global security upfront, not just keep it in the background. All of these issues have to be brought up front instead of just a lot of countries coming in and say'oh, we're gonna do a little mitigation here, a little bit adaptation there, this little stuff we're going to do'. In the meantime, we have record profits from fossil fuel companies because of the Ukraine War. The dichotomy is incredible. While the world is facing existential threat from climate change, fossil fuel use has increased in the meantime, and you can say that's a geopolitical problem. Yes, it is. But this cannot go on. This simply cannot go on. It's unsustainable.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:My thanks to Dr. Ahmed for coming on the show. If you enjoyed this episode, do check out our other episode on climate migration with Sonia Shah and also read Karim's articles for ELCI which are on our website at www.ELC-insight.org as well as being linked in the podcast description alongside some other further reading. Follow or subscribe to us on your preferred podcast platform and you'll hear from us soon with more interesting interviews with climate experts. Thanks for listening.
