Dedicated fund for climate damage missing in final pact

GLASGOW • An agreement reached on Saturday night as the COP26 climate talks closed pushed concerns about growing "loss and damage" from climate change up the agenda, as it becomes harder for many people to live safely on a hotter planet, analysts said.

But the Glasgow Climate Pact - after resistance from the United States, European Union and some other rich nations - failed to secure the establishment of a dedicated new fund for climate damage that vulnerable nations had pushed for earlier in the summit.

Guinea, representing the developing-nation group at the talks, expressed "extreme disappointment" at the decision to initiate only a "dialogue" to talk about "arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimise and address loss and damage".

Low-lying small island nations that fear losing much of their land to rising sea levels - from the Marshall Islands to Fiji and Antigua and Barbuda - also said they were dissatisfied that the fund they had called for had not been created.

Backers of a new "loss and damage" funding facility insisted it should be set up soon, ideally by next year's annual talks in Egypt.

Mr Harjeet Singh, a senior adviser at Climate Action Network International, noted that the Glasgow outcome did at least recognise the rising costs of losses and damage in developing countries.

It said "climate change has already caused and will increasingly cause loss and damage and that, as temperatures rise... will pose an ever greater social, economic and environmental threat".

But, Mr Singh said, the failure to put a fund in place to help poorer nations pay for those costs means "we are walking in inches when we must move in miles".

The Glasgow deal did agree to fund the Santiago Network, a body that aims to build technical expertise on dealing with loss and damage, such as helping countries consider how to move communities away from threatened shorelines.

Mr Ani Dasgupta, president of US-based think-tank World Resources Institute, said COP26 had "finally put the critical issue of loss and damage squarely on the main stage". But "to meet the needs of vulnerable countries, it is essential that the dialogues established in Glasgow be more than talk and result in recommendations on the scale of funding necessary", he added in a statement.

The US and Australia, in particular, have long pushed back against the possibility that industrialised countries with high historic levels of carbon pollution might need to compensate others for the damage caused.

US climate envoy John Kerry told journalists that the country understood increased resources would be needed to help people on the climate change front line, but work should first be undertaken to understand how that money could best be delivered.

A range of ideas has been proposed for how to fund loss and damage costs, including new taxes on fossil fuel sales or aviation.

Developing countries, at the closing session of the conference, welcomed progress in advancing efforts to adapt to climate change.

Adaptation includes measures such as building higher sea walls against flooding, capturing scarce rainwater for irrigation, and switching to drought-tolerant crops.

Countries at the COP26 talks agreed to launch a two-year effort to define a "global goal on adaptation". There was also progress towards setting a firm target for adaptation finance, which currently accounts for just a quarter of international climate finance for developing nations, garnering only US$20 billion (S$27 billion) in 2019.

The Glasgow pact urged developed countries to "urgently and significantly scale up" their adaptation finance, and to at least double it from 2019 levels by 2025, en route to meeting a Paris Agreement goal to fund emissions cuts and adaptation equally.

During the conference, a range of wealthy governments stepped up with new pledges - totalling about US$960 million - for two key United Nations-backed funds that help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change.

Still, the amounts pledged remain far below the annual US$70 billion developing countries are thought to need now, an amount that could rise to US$300 billion a year by 2030, according to the UN.

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