After a four-year set up period, a fund to help vulnerable countries respond to climate impacts is facing criticism from Nigeria’s environment minister over delays in delivering aid, while its chief executive says the first disbursements will be made by the end of the year.
At an event at London Climate Action Week on Tuesday, Nigerian environment minister Balarabe Abbas Lawal said that whenever he goes to UN climate summits “we talk about loss and damage funds, and all these years nothing has been translated into action”.
He added that the fund currently “looks like a mirage”, and said that “a number of our governments are beginning to believe that COPs are just talk shops”.
The idea of addressing the loss and damage caused by climate change was first discussed at COP13 in 2007. A fund was agreed to at COP27 in 2022 to help vulnerable countries respond to climate emergencies, and it was officially set up the next year. Since then, the fund’s board and management have been working out the details of how it will work.
Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, a banker from Senegal, was appointed CEO in 2024. Referring to Lawal’s frustration, Diong told Climate Home News on Thursday that the fund is “moving according to plan”.
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A call for funding requests, launched at COP30, closed on June 15. Projects – including those to strengthen responses to floods in Bangladesh and Lagos and improve water infrastructure in Jamaica – bid for a combined $250 million. Diong said that the fund’s board would decide which projects to fund at its next board meeting in the Philippines, starting on July 8.
“We hope that by the end of the year we can begin then to make the decision and see the funds going, so hopefully the frustration for Nigeria will be reduced”, he said, adding that “every time wasted, when it comes to loss and damage, is lives not saved”.
Funding concerns
While climate campaigners have called for tens of billion of dollars of funding a year, wealthy nations have promised the fund $822 million and delivered just $449 million – with countries like Italy, France and Luxembourg failing to pay in full.
A briefing paper prepared by the fund’s secretariat earlier this year warned that, unless fresh contributions are secured, the fund could run out of resources by the end of 2027.
Diong said that the fund intends to hold a replenishment round, where governments promise money, next year. In the meantime, as public finance “is being very difficult to mobilise”, the fund is looking at other sources of funding.
“What exactly that source of funding will be, we have to look at the potential, look at the feasibility and so on”, he said, so the fund can keep up with demand.
In an open letter in April, a group of climate campaigners called for developed countries to increase contributions to the Loss and Damage fund and introduce taxes on fossil fuel companies, financial transactions, luxury air travel and wealth to help finance it.
“Rich countries must be held strictly accountable for the devastation they have caused,” said Climate Action Network International head Tasneem Essop. “Their failure to fulfill their responsibility to the loss and damage fund is not just an oversight; it is a shameful betrayal of humanity.”
The post As Nigeria rails at loss and damage “mirage”, fund boss assures money is coming appeared first on Climate Home News.
As Nigeria rails at loss and damage “mirage”, fund boss assures money is coming
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.