Developing countries hit by extreme weather, rising seas and other climate change impacts have been asked to submit proposals for support from the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) for the first time, three years after its birth at COP27 in Egypt.
Under the debut call for proposals launched at COP30 in Belém, the fund’s board said $250 million would be available for projects seeking to address a wide range of climate-related losses – from damaged infrastructure to the loss of cultural heritage, or community displacement.
Announcing the launch of the fund’s activities, FRLD Co-Chair Jean-Christophe Donnellier said the initial call for funding requests would help “test, learn and shape the fund’s long-term model”. Fellow Co-Chair Richard Sherman said it “sends an important signal to developing countries that support is available”.
Countries will be able to submit their proposals starting in mid-December for six months through to mid-June, with funding approvals beginning in July next year.
Evans Njewa, chair of the Least Developed Countries Group at the climate talks, hailed the call for proposals as “a practical step toward justice, long awaited by communities on the frontlines”, adding that the loss and damage fund “must now deliver fast, simple and accessible support”.
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Activists fear that could be difficult, however. They say the fund is badly short of resources and will not be able to meet the enormous needs of developing countries.
By 2030, they could require $200 billion-$400 billion a year to address loss and damage caused by storms, droughts, flooding, extreme heat and rising seas made worse by climate change, according to an Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance.
However, developed countries have only pledged $788 million, signed commitments for over $560 million, and actually transferred less than $400 million of that total.
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Climate activist Harjeet Singh, founding director of India’s Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, said that as climate impacts wreak havoc on countries including the Philippines and Jamaica – where Hurricane Melissa is estimated to have caused up to $7 billion in loss and damage – the FRLD “is starting with a fraction of the scale required”.
Singh said the operationalisation of the fund three years after it was agreed showed it had failed to function as a rapid response mechanism.
He called for the fund to correct its course to match “the scale of the crisis, not the scale of political convenience”.
“The countries and communities facing the worst consequences – those who had no role in causing this crisis – deserve more than an empty shell. This is not climate justice,” Singh said.
Acknowledging the need for more resources to meet the vast scale of need on the ground, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, the FRLD’s executive director, said the fund will keep working “to mobilise additional resources to support our long-term ambitions”.
Rising call for L&D support in climate plans
Demands for the fund to expand support are reflected in the national climate plans (NDCs) submitted by developing countries to the UN climate body in the run-up to COP30.
South Africa, Vanuatu, Mauritius and Liberia are among those that have laid out demands for loss and damage support from the FRLD, emphasising that climate impacts in their countries have exceeded the limit to which they can adapt.
South Africa – which suffers prolonged droughts, destructive floods and heatwaves – said climate change is already causing “irreplaceable loss”, damaging cultural heritage sites and hurting Indigenous knowledge systems. It is also shrinking farmland, hitting economic growth and worsening health outcomes, including more heat-related illness and deaths, the country said in its NDC.
With support from the FRLD, South Africa plans to improve how the country records and understands the full impact of climate disasters, including collecting detailed information on who is affected, with particular consideration for women and marginalised groups, so that relief and rebuilding programmes can be more effectively targeted, its NDC said.
For Mauritius, climate-related disasters in 2024 caused losses equivalent to 0.07% of gross domestic product (GDP), and the country plans to seek support from the FRLD for recovery and disaster response systems in sectors including agriculture, fishing, housing and health.
The island country said it planned to use the resources to implement a Climate Compensation Fund mechanism to compensate for loss and damage in terms of personal belongings, loss of lives and inability to work due to climate-related disasters. It also plans to improve the country’s disaster response capacity by equipping emergency relief centres with food and other vital supplies.
The inclusion of loss and damage in countries’ NDCs “makes it clear that there is a cost, which must be covered”, said Mattias Söderberg, global climate lead at DanChurchAid, a Danish NGO.
“We can decide if we want to invest in [emissions] mitigation and adaptation, but when it comes to loss and damage, there is no option. When climate-related disasters happen, communities will have to respond,” he added.
The post Climate-hit nations hail loss and damage fund’s debut call for proposals appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate-hit nations hail loss and damage fund’s debut call for proposals
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
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Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
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None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation
The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines
With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.
At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance.
The nation also championed