The body running the new UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) caused by climate change has recommended that it should focus initially on helping governments rather than local communities deal with the aftermath of climate-driven disasters like floods and droughts.
A proposal by the FRLD’s secretariat, which will be debated at the fund’s board meeting in Barbados next week, says that its 2025-2026 start-up phase should prioritise government support and only later give small grants to communities – something activists have called for – and pay for insurance.
The secretariat aims to launch the fund’s start-up phase by the fourth quarter of 2025, with the first allocations of money for countries likely to be handed out in 2026, just over three years since the fund was agreed at COP27 in Egypt after years of resistance from rich polluting nations.
The FRLD secretariat, led by Senegalese-American banker Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, says its early activities should be “programmatic approaches for long-term needs”, “readiness support for country-led approaches” and “rapid disbursement via direct budget support”. These are all ways to help governments tackle loss and damage by preparing and bolstering their national systems.
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Harjeet Singh, founding director of the India-based Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, welcomed the secretariat’s three priority areas, adding that they align with developing countries’ demands.
But he criticised the deferral of “critical” small grants for local people. “Delaying the operationalisation of small grants, as advocated by civil society, sidelines frontline communities who are already bearing the brunt of climate impacts. Their inclusion cannot be postponed,” he told Climate Home.
“The board must recognise that advancing climate justice requires frontline communities not only to be supported,” he added, “but meaningfully empowered as key actors in both immediate and long-term responses to loss and damage.”
Start with governments
Programmatic approaches are broader, longer-term partnerships with a government that address complex, systemic issues rather than project-based funding which is usually short-term and deals with a single situation.
Readiness support means improving governments’ abilities to respond to climate impacts. The FRLD’s proposal gives examples like conducting risk assessments, setting up early warning systems for extreme weather, making schools and hospitals more resilient to climate change, and educating people on slow-developing climate threats like sea level rise.
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Direct budget support is sending money to governments after a climate disaster to fund their response, which they can spend how they choose. The FRLD says the money could be used for temporary housing for displaced people, cash-for-work schemes and reconnecting power supplies, water and sanitation.
The secretariat proposes that small grants for community-led initiatives may be considered towards the end of the two-year start-up period, when the capacity of the secretariat – whose executive director was only appointed in September – has expanded.
The same would apply to risk-sharing and insurance mechanisms, where the fund subsidises insurance against climate disasters, and performance-based payment initiatives where funds are handed out when milestones in minimising loss and damage are achieved.
The fund’s board has decided that decisions made about the start-up phase will not necessarily set precedents for how the fund works permanently. But Lien Vandamme, a campaigner with the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home that “choices made during this phase will demonstrate where the Board’s priorities lie”.
How much for the most vulnerable countries?
Governments have already agreed that small island developing states (SIDS) and the world’s least developed countries (LDCs) should get a minimum share of the fund’s resources, with donor pledges currently standing at less than $800 million.
The secretariat proposes two options to ensure this. One is a floor for SIDS and LDCs together of somewhere between a quarter and a half of the money. The other is two separate floors – one for SIDS and one for LDCs.
After the start-up period, the fund proposes several options to ensure that one country or group of countries don’t take too much of the money.
One is a percentage cap per country or region, another is a percentage threshold above which the secretariat will monitor allocations, and the third has no percentages but agrees that the secretariat will try to ensure funding is allocated across regions in a balanced manner.
After the start-up phase, there could also be caps on the three different streams of funding – programmatic approaches, rapid disbursement and readiness support.
The secretariat proposes that the start-up phase will prioritise grants, with loans on better-than-market terms coming in later, and that 155 entities accredited to other UN funds like the Green Climate Fund and Adaptation Fund will automatically be accredited to the FRLD.
Need billions, got millions
Despite pledging around $766 million to the fund, governments have so far only signed contribution agreements for $469 million and actually paid in $261 million. The United Arab Emirates has not turned its $100-million commitment – which made headlines at COP28 in Dubai – into a contribution agreement or made a bank transfer.
The US did pay its $17.5-million pledge before Donald Trump took office. Since Trump came to power, vowing to walk away from the UN climate process, the US has surrendered its seat on the FRLD board, which will now go to another developed country.
The Loss and Damage Collaboration, a network of NGOs working on the issue, has estimated that developing countries’ loss and damage needs add up to around $400 billion a year. One climate disaster alone – the 2022 floods in Pakistan – inflicted $30 billion in damage and economic losses, with an additional $16 billion needed to rebuild, according to an international assessment.
Compared with these numbers, the initial amounts wealthy governments have offered to the FRLD fall far short of the rising costs of responding to and repairing the negative impacts of climate change on economies and people.
The post Loss and damage fund proposes helping governments first, local communities later appeared first on Climate Home News.
Loss and damage fund proposes helping governments first, local communities later
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.