Hannah Bond is co-CEO at ActionAid UK.
This month has been unprecedented, even in a news cycle that has grown increasingly immune to ever-worsening climate catastrophes. After Beryl, a powerful category five hurricane, smashed its way across the Caribbean, an alarming report by the Copernicus Climate Change Service found that the planet has breached 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming for the twelfth month straight.
For a new UK government pledging to take strong climate action at home, this must be a wake-up call for it to act on its historic responsibilities as a major global greenhouse gas polluter. These two alarming events alone show why it must put climate finance at the heart of its climate agenda as COP29 rapidly approaches.
In Hurricane Beryl’s shadow, loss and damage fund makes progress on set-up
The Caribbean is one of the regions most at risk of climate change, with 70 percent of its population living or working in coastal areas surrounded by ever-warming seas that make hurricanes like Beryl more common and more violent. While a category five hurricane is unprecedented this early in the year, forecasters have already predicted that the region could experience up to seven severe hurricanes between now and the end of October.
Extreme climate shocks are not only wreaking havoc, claiming lives, and destroying whole communities – they are also severely affecting the region’s tourism-dependent economies. Already it’s been estimated that the clean-up alone will cost tens of millions of dollars – a cost that doesn’t even begin to factor in what’s needed to rebuild destroyed communities still paying the price of previous disasters – crises that are gendered in their nature.
Costly damage
Women and girls are more than 14 times more likely to be killed by climate shocks, according to Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia, while our own research found that women also face an increased risk of non-economic impacts such as gender-based violence and forced child marriage.
Hurricane Maria – the deadliest Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the 21st century – cost the island nation of Dominica an estimated 225 percent of its GDP, while Hurricane Irma in the same year cost Antigua and Barbuda more than $136 million in damages, with the tourism industry representing around 44 percent of all losses.
Even seven years on, the scale of the destruction has meant that communities are still rebuilding while dealing with hurricanes that worsen with intensity and frequency with each passing year. Yet, despite this, small island nations that have only contributed around 1% of all global carbon emissions, have struggled to unlock climate finance, accessing a mere $1.5bn out of the $100bn pledged in total to Global South countries.
Negative debt spiral
To make matters worse, countries across the Caribbean have no choice but to turn to international financial institutions and take on eye-watering levels of debt to help communities regain their footing. Debt laden with restrictive repayment conditions further locks countries into a negative spiral – forcing governments to shape their economies and societies in order to service their debts.
All this means that small island nations are left to play catch up, forever stuck on the back foot. Instead of spending the meagre levels of finance pledged to resilience-proofing their economies and communities, loans are used to service debts while interest rates for repayments globally remain at a record high.
In its manifesto, Britain’s Labour Party spoke about “tackling unsustainable debt” as a “priority area” in its global commitments – indeed a positive step forward. But in power we need it to act and end the colonial debt system and support countries in the Caribbean and beyond move towards a just and climate resilient future.
The Loss and Damage Fund must not leave fragile states behind
For a new government keen to show global leadership on climate, this year’s COP summit is a vital moment for the UK to play a much stronger role on climate finance than its Conservative predecessors. As the fourth-highest historic carbon emitter in the world, the UK has a moral and historic responsibility to address climate change, but its actions haven’t matched its words so far.
During its election campaign, Labour failed to pledge new funds to address the huge gulf in climate financing for losses and damages, opting instead to simply deliver the previous government’s low-ball commitments to spend £11.6bn between 2021-2026. With nations set to meet at COP this year to define new annual climate finance commitments for Global South countries – known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) – Labour needs to be much more ambitious in Azerbaijan. The future of communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis depends on it.
Now, in the words of Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickson Mitchell, is not the time for countries like the UK to “sit idly by with platitudes and tokenism.” Now is the time for radical action and for the new UK government to stand up and deliver for the billions of people facing a runaway climate emergency.
The post Hurricane Beryl shows why the new UK government must ramp up climate finance appeared first on Climate Home News.
Hurricane Beryl shows why the new UK government must ramp up climate finance
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Picture an American farm in your mind.
I fell flat on my backside one afternoon this January and, weirdly, it made me think of you. Okay, I know that takes a bit of unpacking—so let me go back and start at the beginning.
For the last six years, our family has joined with half a dozen others to spend a week or so up at Wangat Lodge, located on a 50-acre subtropical rainforest property around three hours north of Sydney. The accommodation is pretty basic, with no wifi coverage—so time in Wangat really revolves around the bush. You live by the rhythm of the sun and the rain, with the days punctuated by swimming in the river and walking through the forest.
An intrinsic part of Wangat is Dan, the owner and custodian of the place, and the guide on our walks. He talks about time, place, and care with great enthusiasm, but always tenderly and never with sanctimony. “There is no such thing as ‘the same walk’”, is one of Dan’s refrains, because the way he sees it “every day, there is change in the world around you” of plants, animals, water and weather. Dan speaks of Wangat with such evident love, but not covetousness; it is a lightness which includes gentle consciousness that his own obligations arise only because of the historic dispossession of others. He inspires because of how he is.
One of the highlights this year was a river walk with Dan, during which we paddled or waded through most of the route, with only occasional scrambles up the bank. Sometimes the only sensible option is to swim. Among the life around us, we notice large numbers of tadpoles in the water, which is clean enough to drink. Our own tadpoles, the kids in the group, delight in the expedition. I overhear one of the youngest children declaring that she’s having ‘one of the best days ever’. Dan looks content. Part of his mission is to reintroduce children to nature, so that the soles of their feet may learn from the uneven ground, and their muscles from the cool of the water.
These moments are for thankfulness in the life that lives.
It is at the very end of the walk when I overbalance and fall on my arse—and am reminded of the eternal truth that rocks are hard. As I gingerly get up, my youngest daughter looks at me, caught between amusement and concern, and asks me if I’m okay.
I have to think before answering, because yes, physically I’m fine. But I feel too, an underlying sense of discomfort; it is that omnipresent pressure of existential awareness about the scale of suffering and ecological damage now at large in the world, made so much more immediately acute after Bondi; the dissonance that such horrors can somehow exist simultaneously with this small group being alive and happy in this place, on this earth-kissed afternoon.
How is it okay, to be “okay”? What is it to live with conscience in Wangat? Those of us who still have access to time, space, safety and high levels of volition on this planet carry this duality all the time, as our gift and obligation. It is not an easy thing to make sense of; but for me, it speaks to the question of ‘why Greenpeace’? Because the moral and strategic mission-focus of campaigning provides a principled basis for how each of us can bridge that interminable gulf.
The essence of campaigning is to make the world’s state of crisis legible and actionable, by isolating systemic threats to which we can rise and respond credibly, with resources allocated to activity in accordance with strategy. To be part of Greenpeace, whether as an activist, volunteer supporter or staff member, is to find a home for your worries for the world in confidence and faith that together we have the power to do something about it. Together we meet the confusion of the moment with the light of shared purpose and the confidence of direction.
So, it was as I was getting back up again from my tumble and considering my daughter’s question that I thought of you—with gratitude, and with love–-because we cross this bridge all the time, together, everyday; to face the present and the future.
‘Yes, my love’, I say to my daughter, smiling as I get to my feet, “I’m okay”. And I close my eyes and think of a world in which the fires are out, and everywhere, all tadpoles have the conditions of flourishing to be able to grow peacefully into frogs.
Thank you for being a part of Greenpeace.
With love,
David
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