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In the aftermath of Cyclone Chido, which battered the French overseas department of Mayotte on Saturday, locals and experts told Climate Home News that the government had not done enough to prepare the island territory off the east coast of Africa for the growing threat from powerful storms.
High winds, heavy rain and huge waves contributed to a death toll which authorities fear could rise from the current count of 31 to more than 1,000 on Mayotte’s two islands where many people – particularly tens of thousands of undocumented migrants – live in “banga” slums with tin roofs.
France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, said Mayotte was “totally devastated” and about 70% of the population had been severely affected. The French Red Cross said the damage was “unimaginable”.
The cyclone was the strongest to hit Mayotte in at least 90 years, according to the Météo-France weather service, whose Francois Gourand said the storm was super-charged by particularly warm Indian Ocean waters.
On top of this, experts told Climate Home News that failures to adapt to climate change had worsened the impact of the storm. “The island was so fragile,” said one local official, who did not want to be named, explaining that the buildings were too weak to withstand the winds.
Researcher Emily Wilkinson, director of ODI Global’s resilient and sustainable islands initiative, said Mayotte’s plans to get residents to safety were not good enough.
During a visit to Mayotte starting on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron defended the government’s response to a crowd of angry locals, saying that the territory had been prepared for the cyclone. “There were warnings. The services were there,” he insisted, adding that a lot more aid in the form of food and water was on its way.
According to Reuters, he also told reporters on Friday that France had invested heavily in Mayotte but its institutions could not keep up with the arrival of migrants.
‘Second-class citizens’
Mayotte is geographically part of the Comoros archipelago off the east African coast near Madagascar, which was under French control from the 19th century.
In 1974, the four Comoros island groupings held popular votes on whether to become independent of France. Three overwhelmingly voted yes and formed a nation called the Union of the Comoros.
But Mayotte’s people said no, becoming an overseas community and then one of France’s five overseas departments a few decades later in 2011, with its people becoming French citizens and voting in French elections.
Despite its affiliation, Mayotte has remained much poorer than the rest of France and suffers from high rates of unemployment and crime. Nonetheless, its status as part of France has attracted migrants from places like Comoros and about a third of its population is said to be from outside Mayotte, many of whom live in dilapidated buildings in slums.
Recognising that its overseas departments are at risk from cyclones made worse by climate change, the French government has a special green fund which channels money to projects like reinforcing buildings in these vulnerable regions.
As of the end of 2023, the fund had contributed €1.35m ($1.4m) towards six projects in Martinique, Guadeloupe and La Reunion but none in the other overseas departments of French Guiana or Mayotte.
The official in Mayotte, who has experience of accessing climate funds, said there is a “lack of expertise at a local level” that prevents the territory tapping such support, adding that Mayotte had not been hit by a big cyclone for 50 years “so they don’t have any premonition about this situation”.
But Samira Ben Ali, a young climate campaigner from Mayotte who lives in Paris, accused the French government of ignoring warnings from local activists and politicians and not fulfilling promises to finance adaptation on the islands.
“What is happening in Mayotte now is definitely a failure of governance from France,” she told Climate Home. “It really feels like we’re second-class citizens.”
Wilkinson said advanced economies like France are “not taking adaptation seriously” in comparison with efforts to cut planet-heating emissions because “they’re not thinking about parts of their territory which are located in more climate-sensitive regions”.
The adaptation projects that do exist are focused mainly on protecting mainland France rather than overseas territories, she said – “and that’s a real gap”.
Shut out of climate funds
As part of a developed country like France, Mayotte is not eligible to submit projects to UN climate funds like the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund or the new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.
“From the perspective of other vulnerable countries, they would argue that these territories should be receiving support directly from central governments of the UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark – the EU countries with overseas territories,” Wilkinson explained.
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But at a conference ODI organised in Brussels in October, she said, larger overseas territories showed interest in ratifying the Paris climate agreement “as a way of… broaching the topic and perhaps further down the line being able to become eligible for some of the climate funds”. Denmark’s overseas territory of Greenland ratified it in July.
The level of death and destruction on Mayotte also shows the need for early warning systems that go beyond just alerting residents to oncoming storms, Wilkinson said.
Ineffective warnings
Météo-France said in a statement that “the heavy loss of life occurred despite accurate and timely warnings” it provided more than 50 hours in advance, and Climate Home was told that warnings were communicated by email and on the news.
Wilkinson acknowledged this, but said not enough information had been given about what residents should do to protect themselves from a storm like that. In other parts of the world, advice is usually offered by a disaster manager employed by local authorities, who tells residents where to go to be safe and what to take with them. She pointed to Bangladesh as a country that does this well.
But Mayotte lacked evacuation centres that had been set up and checked ahead of time with clear instructions for using them, she said. “If you don’t have that system in place, then people don’t leave their homes,” she added.
Mayotte resident Fahar Abdoulhamidi told the Associated Press the island’s many undocumented migrants were particularly hesitant to go to shelters as they were scared they would be arrested and deported. Ben Ali said she was “just really saddened that they thought that”.
Asked whether local people’s feeling of abandonment by the French government would spur calls for independence, Ben Ali said those conversations would come after basic needs for food, water and shelter are met.
But Wilkinson warned “there’s a real danger that if the French government doesn’t respond with the adequate resources and attention to reconstruction” then it could spur independence protests similar to those seen in France’s Pacific overseas territory of New Caledonia triggered by proposed reforms to voting rights.
Macron has pledged to rebuild the islands’ devastated infrastructure and homes.
(Reporting by Joe Lo and Vivian Chime; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post After Cyclone Chido, France accused of neglecting climate threat to “fragile” Mayotte appeared first on Climate Home News.
After Cyclone Chido, France accused of neglecting climate threat to “fragile” Mayotte
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Countries have completed the first “global review” of their progress towards reversing nature loss by 2030 at the COP17 biodiversity talks in Yerevan, Armenia.
The review “notes with deep concern” that, unless action is “rapidly accelerated”, the goal to reverse nature loss and meet a set of 23 targets by 2030 “will not be achieved”.
It “urges” countries to accelerate action, including by “increased ambition in addressing the gaps”.
Much of the discussions in Yerevan focused on how to raise the necessary funds to help developing countries protect nature.
Some major economies pushed to expand the range of nations that are expected to provide finance, with countries agreeing at the end of the two weeks of talks that non-donors that want to contribute can “signal interest” before COP18.
This came after developed countries failed to meet a target to significantly ramp up nature finance over the last few years.
It also came as a landmark fund agreed at COP16 in Colombia to pay communities for the genetic resources derived from nature stands nearly empty two years on.
The Yerevan talks marked the halfway point of the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” (GBF), the “Paris Agreement for nature” first made in 2022 and due to be achieved by 2030.
During the nearly 12-hour-long final plenary, countries voted for Quito, Ecuador, to host the COP18 nature talks, which will be held in 2028.
Countries managed to sign off on all the major negotiation texts, marking a stark contrast to COP16, which ran so far over time that the Colombian presidency lost “quorum”, forcing talks to resume in Rome months later.
Below, Carbon Brief has detailed analysis of all of the key outcomes from COP17.
Formal negotiations
Finance
Finance, predictably, was at the heart of the discord and deadlock at the Yerevan talks.
At COP17, discussions on finance had to achieve several outcomes.
The first part – to take stock of biodiversity finance mobilised so far to meet the nature deal’s goals – fell under the global review.
As the global report noted, developed countries failed to meet their commitments to raise “at least $20bn a year by 2025” for nature. Delegates pointed to falling aid levels and a sharp 27% decline in environmental funding for the 2026-30 period.
The second part was to agree on how to mobilise resources for the next four years, to meet the GBF’s goals and targets.
Calls to “broaden the contributor base” of who pays to protect nature – and whether that should include emerging economies – became the most fraught element of the talks.
Eventually, countries agreed on what Switzerland described as a “super, mega-delicate” text. It hinged on major “political compromises”, with “no major winner or loser”, according to Kenya.
Per the decision, countries that want to be included on a list of developed country donors can “signal interest” through bilateral, confidential consultations before COP18 and every alternate COP after.
Finally, countries also agreed on criteria to shape and resource a new, permanent financial mechanism to protect nature after 2030.
However, this did not immediately take the form of a new fund under the COP that biodiverse countries have demanded since 2022, deferring the mechanism’s institutional structure to COP18.
Resource mobilisation discussions at the GBF’s halfway mark were supposed to agree on how to close the “biodiversity finance gap” and to “increase resources from all sources” to “at least” $200bn per year by 2030, as set out in target 19 of the GBF.
The talks were largely dominated by a push, led by the JUSCANZ bloc of developed countries, to “broaden the contributor base”. This could see emerging economies, such as Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia and India, being added to the list of countries that pay to protect nature.
Article 20 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) states that developed countries “shall provide new and additional financial resources” to developing countries to meet the costs of implementing measures to protect nature.
The text states that other countries – including emerging economies – may “voluntarily assume” these obligations to pay. However, it adds that this list of developed countries “shall” be reviewed periodically and amended “if necessary”.
The list was last amended in 2006.
(See this “jargon buster” which explains the specific meaning and legal weight of various terms and verbs used in UN formal documents.)
Discussions around this fraught subject had reached a dead end at intersessional talks this year, but resurfaced in Yerevan.
The first “non-paper” had four different options for expanding the contributor base. These ranged from using the World Bank’s country income groups “as a proxy” to identify high-income countries, to commissioning a study on the impacts of being included on the list.
By 21 October, the number of options swelled to eight, including two from Saudi Arabia and one from Peru.
Some countries “expressed concern” that certain options were based on a CBD secretariat study on “what constitutes a developed country”, Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported.
By the end of the first week, it was clear that the finance deadlock would have to go into informal ministerial consultations for any consensus to emerge.
At a press conference on 28 October, Christopher O’Sullivan, Ireland’s nature minister and representing the EU delegation, told Carbon Brief:
“Our position isn’t that we want to pull back in terms of contributing…but it’s been 20 years since that list was added to, times have changed and there are new realities. We just simply want those new realities reflected. I don’t fully understand why there’s so much opposition to that.”
The EU chose not to comment on which countries it would like to see on that list.
Lim Li Ching from the Third World Network, meanwhile, called the push for others to “assume the obligations” of developed countries “sheer hypocrisy”, adding that any country could make a voluntary contribution. She told Carbon Brief:
“At a forum like the CBD, this linking of income status with finance does not take into account where historical and current responsibilities lie. If you want to generate more funding for biodiversity, let’s look at sovereign debt burdens and rules, which are inequitable for developing countries. But if you can fund wars, and provide resources for your defence industry, then you know where the priorities are.”
On 29 October – at a plenary meant to adopt final texts for the most contentious subjects – Norway’s Gaute Hanssen announced that resource-mobilisation discussions would go into a smaller “friends of the chair” meeting.
Facilitated by Carolina Caceres from Canada and Imèn Meliane from Tunisia, the meeting would discuss the most contentious elements of a draft decision that had swelled to 112 brackets, denoting areas of disagreement on specific details in the text.
While the meeting was open to all, countries that were called to be present included Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, the EU, Fiji, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UK.
At the same time, a “non-paper” text by finance and environment ministers laid out countries’ red lines and compromises.
At the end of COP17, countries welcomed a final compromise text, with Kenya thanking the “strong women” co-chairs who strove to strike a “delicate” balance.
China, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Fiji cautioned against any further interventions, with Brazil warning: “If we open this text, we will never close it again.”
While the final decision “recognises” that “contributions from more parties would improve the mobilisation” of biodiversity finance, it steered away from issuing criteria to expand the list of donor countries.
The text makes it clear that no additions to the list would be made without inviting and confidentially consulting with interested countries, to secure their explicit consent.
Instead, the CBD secretariat “invites” countries keen to be on the list and “assume the obligations” of developed countries to “signal interest” before COP18 and at every alternate COP thereafter.
At the same time, developing countries can contribute to meeting the GBF and biodiversity convention’s goals on a “voluntary basis”, with contributions not implying inclusion on the list.
A negotiator for China told Carbon Brief at the closing plenary:
“We welcome this balanced document. It was a very long discussion that has gone [on] since [2022 nature talks in] Nairobi. But actually this time, there were a lot of sensitive issues, [there were] a lot of critical things we didn’t open in the contact groups; it mainly went to the high-level discussion.”
The decision also establishes a financial mechanism for nature funding after 2030 under the governance of the COP, a key ask from developing countries.
However, it defers decisions on what form this mechanism would take – whether this would be a new fund or based on existing arrangements – until COP18.
Oscar Soria at the Common Initiative told Carbon Brief that the decision on the financial mechanism leaves things “very open”, with “no movement” towards a new fund or money and no upgrades to existing funding arrangements.
The text acknowledges the links between debt and biodiversity eight times, mentioning how debt-related instruments can be included in biodiversity plans, but does not go further.
“It is almost as if the debt studies they called for at COP16 didn’t happen,” said Soria, who had earlier flagged serious methodological issues with the first-ever COP-commissioned report on debt and biodiversity.
Global review
In Yerevan, countries agreed on the first stocktake of progress towards the 2030 nature targets – known as the “global review”.
The review was one of the keenly anticipated outcomes from COP17 and was seen as less controversial than some of the other major negotiation strands.
It was swiftly signed off by countries at the start of the final COP17 plenary, with just one last-minute addition.
The concept of carrying out a global review on “collective progress” was set out in the GBF and its underlying documents.
The details of how this review would be carried out were supposed to be agreed at COP16, but it was not discussed before the plenary