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The climate loss and damage fund so triumphantly announced at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai isn’t likely to begin distributing real dollars until 2025, while countries on the front lines of the climate emergency face mounting drought, crop losses, and a continuing “cycle of vulnerability”.
Early agreement on a draft framework for an international loss and damage fund, with the World Bank as its temporary host, was a long-awaited signature achievement on the first day of COP28 deliberations. The fund, which accumulated about US$700 million in pledges by the mid-point in the two-week conference, was meant to help the world’s poorest countries address climate impacts so severe that they’re beyond anything they can adapt to.
At the time, the Guardian reported that the pledges amounted to less than 0.2% of what will be needed to cover the estimated $400 billion in losses that vulnerable countries face each year. But advocates and negotiators who had spent decades watching the COP process fall short of any loss and damage agreement at all still declared at least a conditional victory.
“We think this is a significant step forward,” said Canadian Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault. “Canada has been arguing now more than a year that we should have a serious conversation about loss and damage after ignoring it for almost 30 years.”
But now, even that small, initial gain is bogging down, with a first meeting of the loss and damage fund’s newly-appointed board due to take place in late April and a final operating agreement for the fund expected by late July. “Despite soaring needs for help, the fund itself isn’t expected to hand out any money until 2025 at the earliest,” Climate Home News reports, citing official sources.
“Would-be recipients of the loss and damage fund’s resources are already jostling for position in a growing queue of nations hoping for help—and its board faces an unenviable task: figuring out how to fairly divide very little money among too many people in desperate need of it, as climate impacts accelerate in a warming world.”
Pakistan alone is looking for $16 billion to rebuild from the 2022 floods that inundated one-third of the country. Zambia needs help with dwindling water supplies after losing half of this year’s maize crop to severe drought, while “crumbling coastal communities” in Senegal are facing faster coastal erosion due to sea level rise.
“The need is for trillions—and what we have is millions, not even billions,” Ritu Bharadwaj, a climate finance and governance researcher at the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development, told Climate Home. The news report covers some of the options for making the fund’s limited resources stretch further.
Malawi would need about $700 million—the total amount currently available in the loss and damage fund—to cover the devastation that Cyclone Freddy left behind in 2023, African Arguments writes, in a post that recaps the controversies and uncertainties that still surround the fund’s creation. “Malawians displaced by Cyclone Freddy have already been waiting a year for a meaningful response to their loss of livelihoods, homes, and communities,” the news story states, and “it may yet be another year before poor countries can begin to draw these much-needed funds.”
And Freddy, which brought six months of rain in six days and affected about 2.3 million people, was not a one-off event, Zero Carbon Analytics reported last November. With extreme weather becoming more frequent in the region, it was Malawi’s third severe storm in a year, producing cumulative losses of more than $1 billion. As emergency response and rehabilitation efforts divert resources from longer-term recovery and development efforts, “the government of Malawi said that climate-induced shocks are worsening macro-economic instability and ‘making it harder for Malawi to break the cycle of vulnerability’,” the analysis stated.
The government estimates suggest the country loses an average of 1.7% of its GDP every year as a result of climate change-related disasters.”
It cited an Action Aid analysis that showed 93% of countries on the front lines of the climate emergency “drowning in debt”, adding that loss and damage costs in Africa are expected to total $290 to $440 billion this decade, depending on the level of warming.
Elsewhere, Bloomberg News said three central and southern African countries have been reeling after receiving record or near-record low rainfall in February. The drought killed crops and triggered power shortages that endangered copper production and the revenue it brings into national economies.
“The dry spell, blamed on the El Niño weather phenomenon, is the latest indicator of how severely Africa is being impacted by extreme weather events that scientists say are becoming increasingly frequent and severe because of climate change—even though it produces far less global-warming gases than developed regions,” Bloomberg wrote in early March. Zambia lost 45% of its planted areas just as the corn crop was supposed to be maturing, driving up prices of an everyday essential by an average 76%. Farmers in Zimbabwe were giving up on their harvests, with food prices in some areas doubling in three months. And water flows powering hydropower turbines on the Zambezi River were “less than a quarter of what they were a year ago.”
“This drought has devastating consequences,” Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said in a national address. “The destruction caused by the prolonged drought spell is immense.”
