As Caribbean nations tallied the destruction caused by the passage of Hurricane Beryl, the board of the fund set up to compensate for such devastating loss and damage held its second meeting this week.
“The level of damage is apocalyptic,” said Henrietta Elizabeth Thompson from Barbados, among the countries worst hit by the natural disaster, at the start of the four-day session in Incheon, South Korea.
The board needs to create a fund that “reflects the scale of the magnitude, of the risk, the damage and devastation faced by people across the world and the urgency required to respond to it,” she added.
But before the fund starts handing out any money in future, board members have to agree on procedural matters.
A name and a place
On the opening day, the Philippines was picked as the host of the fund’s board in a secret vote by members. The Southeast Asian nation defeated bids from seven other candidates: Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Bahamas, Barbados, Eswatini, Kenya and Togo.
Selecting a host country was one of the most pressing priorities for this week’s meeting. It represented a first necessary step for the board to take up a legal personality and enter into formal agreements with the World Bank, set to host the loss and damage fund on an interim basis.
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While the administrative staff of the fund will be based at the World Bank, the board will carry out some of its meetings in the Philippines in the future, likely in the capital Manila. The country’s proposal scored particularly high thanks to its abundant transport options and accommodation facilities and its visa free entry for short stays for most visitors, according to a background paper.
A man stands in a home where the roof was ripped apart, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, July 5, 2024. REUTERS/Maria Alejandra Cardona
The somewhat thorny issue of what to officially call the fund also landed on the table in South Korea.
For nearly all climate talks participants, it’s simply been the “loss and damage fund” since it was adopted at COP27, but the United States have made various attempts at a rebrand. At COP28 in Dubai, for example, then U.S. climate envoy John Kerry kept referring to the “fund for climate impact response” – a more neutral label that softened the suggestion of developed countries’ historical responsibility.
In consultations ahead of the meeting, the co-chairs of the board collected various options, from the minimalistic “the Fund” to the highly technocratic “Fund referred to in decisions 1/CP.28 and 5/CMA.5”.
Ultimately, members decided to go with “Fund for responding to Loss and Damage”, abbreviated as FLD, without spending much time debating the matter.
Beware the ‘billions’
Divisions cropped up when the discussion turned to the process of selecting the executive director (ED). Hoping to announce the name of the executive director at COP29 this November, the board had to agree at this session on the criteria for picking the fund’s boss, including the roles and responsibilities.
Several board members from developing countries wanted the ED’s job description to mention efforts to find additional money for the fund at the scale of billions. “If you have someone running a fund of 100 million, this is totally different from 10 billion, 55 billion, or 100 billion,” said Egypt’s Mohamed Nasr, “the scale of this fund is not confined to where it is”.
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Countries have pledged around $700 million to the fund so far, with Italy, Germany, France and the United Arab Emirates among the biggest contributors. The United States has pledged only $17.5 million. South Korea pledged $7 million at this week’s meeting. The residual costs from loss and damage is projected to reach a total of $290 billion to $580 billion by 2030, according to a 2018 study.
But some developed country board members, including the US, rejected the proposal of including a reference to “billions”, according to observers.
“It is clear that developed nations…remain non-committal about scaling financial mobilisation,” said Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, who attended the meeting. “The initial commitments of a few hundred million dollars are merely a drop in the ocean compared to the real and escalating costs of climate change that developing countries endure,” he added.
Eventually, board members found a compromise wording. The ED will be asked to lead efforts to grow the fund’s resources “towards contributing to a response at scale to respond to climate-induced loss and damage”.
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The recruitment process will now go underway with the goal of putting a shortlist of candidates in front of the board by the next meeting scheduled for September 18-20 in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Legal agreements
Between now and then, there will be little time for a summer break.
After approving last June the conditions of hosting the fund, the World Bank now has until August 12 to share with board members the draft text of the agreements detailing how that will work in practice. It will include things like provisions to handle the money and give access to recipients and the rules governing the relationship between the board and the World Bank.
Developing countries and civil society groups are eager to see guarantees that communities in hard-hit countries will be able to access funds directly without going through various intermediary agencies.
“Agreeing and certifying these agreements will be the most important decision at the next board meeting”, said Liane Schalatek, associate director of the Heinrich in Washington who attended the board meeting. “The World Bank has shared an outline of what they will include, but we are talking about legal agreements so the devil is in the detail”.
The post In Hurricane Beryl’s shadow, loss and damage fund makes progress on set-up appeared first on Climate Home News.
In Hurricane Beryl’s shadow, loss and damage fund makes progress on set-up
Climate Change
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Freepoint Eco-Systems seeks to become a major player in so-called “chemical recycling.” Some residents and environmental advocates are fighting back.
Belching smoke from a new plastic waste processing plant in central Ohio has stirred opposition to an even larger “chemical recycling” factory planned for Arizona by the same company.
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Climate Change
Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’
Countries attending a first-of-its-kind fossil-fuel summit have been asked to consider “action recommendations” such as “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “reject[ing] gas as a bridging fuel”, according to a preliminary scientific report seen by Carbon Brief.
Around 50 nations will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia from 24-29 April to debate ways to “transition away” from fossil fuels, in the face of worsening climate change and sky-high oil prices.
The talks come after a large group of nations campaigned for, but ultimately failed, to get all countries to formally agree to a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November.
The nations gathering in Santa Marta for the summit co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, call themselves the “coalition of the willing”.
Ahead of country officials arriving in Santa Marta, a global group of academics will gather in the city this week to present and discuss the latest scientific evidence on fossil-fuel phaseout, which will then inform debate among policymakers.
A preliminary scientific “synthesis report” circulated to governments attending the talks and seen by Carbon Brief offers 12 “action insights” for countries to consider, along with a wide range of “action recommendations”.
These recommendations range from “phase out subsidies on fossil-fuel production and consumption” to “kick-start a forum to develop a legal framework to ban fossil-fuel advertisements”.
‘Rapid’ assessment
The preliminary scientific report seen by Carbon Brief – titled, “Action insights for the Santa Marta process” – is the result of some rapid work by an “ad-hoc” group of around 24 scientists.
It is designed to present governments attending the talks with concrete and actionable recommendations for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The preliminary version, which includes recommendations such as “halting all new fossil fuel expansion”, has already been circulated to governments, with a view that this could help them to prepare for the talks in advance.
It will be further debated and refined by scientists attending the academic segment of the Santa Marta talks, before a final version is made public towards the end of April, Carbon Brief understands.
The process to produce the report began shortly after the conclusion of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November, explains its lead author, Dr Friedrich Bohn, a research scientist and co-founder of the Earth Resilience Institute in Germany. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When [Brazil] announced there would be a Santa Marta conference led by Colombia and the Netherlands, I was sitting listening with a small group of scientists. We thought: ‘This is great news, but it should be supported by scientific expertise.’”
One of the members of Bohn’s group had a pre-existing relationship with the Colombian government, allowing a dialogue to quickly be established, he continues:
“In the beginning, the idea was to just write a peer-reviewed paper. But, because of this close connection to the Colombian government and some feedback from them, the synthesis paper evolved.”
The report came out of a “very rapidly evolved process” that relied on the “goodwill” and “enthusiasm” of the academics involved, adds coordinating author Prof Frank Jotzo, a professor of climate change economics at Australian National University. (Jotzo is a former Carbon Brief contributing editor.) He tells Carbon Brief:
“It’s an attempt to get broad coverage on relevant topics from researchers with good expertise and reputation.”
The group of 24 scientists involved spent around two months compiling the “action insights” for the report, drawing on their expertise and the latest available research, says Jotzo.
Given the rapid nature of the report, it does not aim to be “completist”, has not been externally reviewed and did not follow a stringent process for author selection comparable to that used by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, he adds.
The contributors to the report currently skew to the global north and include more men than women, adds Bohn.
‘Direct guidance’
In a departure from IPCC reports, the preliminary Santa Marta synthesis report offers “very direct guidance to action”, says Jotzo.
The report lists 12 “action insights”, each with three “action recommendations”. (The list was cut down from a shortlist of about 40-50 insights, Carbon Brief understands.)
One of the most striking in the draft is “action insight 5”, which says:
“Take immediate measures to prevent future emissions. Ban new fossil infrastructure, mandate deep methane cuts, accelerate electrification and inscribe fossil-fuel phase-down targets in NDCs [nationally determined contributions] and clean-energy pathways support to low and middle income countries (LMICs).”
The accompanying three “action recommendations” include “halting all new fossil-fuel extraction and infrastructure projects ahead of a final investment decision”, “implementing deep, legally binding methane cuts in the energy sector” and “inscrib[ing] targets for fossil-fuel phase down, electrification and green exports in NDCs”.
(The draft report includes multiple references to “phasing out” and “phasing down” fossil fuels, rather than the “transition away from fossil fuels” language that was, ultimately, agreed by countries at the COP28 UN climate talks in Dubai in 2023.)
Another action insight says “public support for climate action is broadly underestimated and undermined by interest groups, but it can be strengthened by debunking greenwashing narratives”.
One recommendation for this insight is that nations “reject natural gas as a bridging technology and CCS [carbon capture and storage] techniques as scalable compensation”.
In a letter introducing the report to governments and civil society, the scientists note that making direct recommendations is a “challenge for our community”, but added:
“However, in the spirit of a constructive collaboration between science and policymaking, we allowed ourselves to identify some potential courses of action that our community would recommend for each particular issue – and we invite you to weigh these against your own circumstances and pick up whatever seems most useful for you and your colleagues.”
The prescriptiveness of the recommendations – something strictly prohibited in IPCC reports – was an explicit request from the Colombian government, Bohn says:
“The idea of actionable recommendations was introduced by the Colombian government.
“There was some discussion within the team about this. It’s a tricky area when you leave science and move to consultation. Therefore, we agreed, in the end, to call them ‘actionable recommendations’ and to make them as precise as possible, from the scientific perspective.”
Jotzo, a veteran of the IPCC process, tells Carbon Brief that it was “very liberating” to work on a report with a “free-form process”:
“The bulk of policy-related research is very readily deployed to recommendations pointing out what countries could do. The IPCC process, for example, just doesn’t allow that. As far as the summary for policymakers in the IPCC is concerned, it will usually be governments that filter out anything that could be interpreted as a specific recommendation.”
He adds that the hope is that some of the action insights might be reflected in the high-level segment of the Santa Marta conference:
“No one is under any illusions that governments will walk away from the Santa Marta conference and will have made a decision to implement recommendations one, seven and nine – or something like that. But it is a chance to insert directly applicable action points into national and plurilateral policy agendas.”
Colombia calling
The preliminary report will be further debated and refined by scientists attending the “pre-academic segment” of the Santa Marta talks.
This is taking place from 24-26 April, ahead of the “high-level segment” involving ministers and other policymakers from 28-29 April.
The pre-academic segment will also separately see the launch of a new advisory panel on fossil-fuel transition and a scientifically led roadmap for how Colombia can transition away from fossil fuels, Carbon Brief understands.
The high-level segment is expected to be attended by representatives from around 50 countries, including COP31 host Turkey and major oil-and-gas producers such as the UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Norway.
Countries expected to attend account for one-third of global fossil-fuel demand and one-fifth of global production, according to the Colombian government.
At the end of the conference, countries are due to release a report featuring a “menu of solutions” for transitioning away from fossil fuels, according to Colombia’s environment minister Irene Vélez Torres.
This report is in turn set to inform a global “roadmap” on transitioning away from fossil fuels being developed by the Brazilian COP30 presidency, which is due to be presented at COP31 in Turkey this November.
The Brazilian COP30 presidency offered to bring forward a “voluntary” fossil-fuel transition “roadmap” outside of the official COP process, after countries failed to formally agree to one during negotiations in Belém.
The post Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’
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