Next week’s seventh meeting of the board of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) in Manila presents a critical moment for a course correction.
The fund’s establishment in 2022 was hailed by climate justice advocates. However, three years later, its operations and future are hampered by insufficient attention to human rights and the communities most impacted, as well as a severe lack of resources. Currently, less than 0,1% of the estimated funding needs are in the FRLD’s bank account.
Key items on the Manila meeting’s agenda, including the fund’s start-up phase and its long-awaited resource mobilization strategy, could change this. It’s also the first meeting since the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s historic advisory opinion on the legal obligations of states in respect of climate change.
This authoritative legal opinion clarifies states’ loss and damage obligations and has significant implications for ensuring that the fund will effectively deliver resources at scale directly to communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis, in line with their right to remedy.
A long-awaited clarification
The advisory opinion comes with unparalleled legitimacy: all countries agreed through a consensus resolution by the UN General Assembly to ask the ICJ for guidance on their international legal obligations in the context of climate change.
Decades of foot-dragging and deliberate blockage under the climate regime have led to rapidly escalating climate harm. It’s therefore no surprise that the most climate-vulnerable countries, like small island developing states and their communities, led the charge on taking climate change up to the world’s highest court.
The importance of this ruling – an authoritative interpretation of binding international law – cannot be understated, particularly for loss and damage.
Legal obligation to remedy climate harm
The court strongly affirmed that climate harm – also known as loss and damage – is a reality that requires dedicated responses and finance as a matter of obligations, including within the climate regime. This is especially true for those most responsible for causing the crisis, in line with long-established principles of equity and Common But Differentiated Responsibilities.
The ICJ also affirmed loud and clear that human rights law is critical to interpreting and addressing loss and damage: not only is the climate crisis harming a wide range of fundamental human rights, but rights-based principles and standards are also fundamental to loss and damage responses.
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Additionally, by looking at international law holistically, the court endorsed what grassroots movements have long known: frontline communities and countries have a right to full reparation.
The court confirmed the basic principle of international law that those who breach their legal obligations, including under the climate treaties, have a duty to repair the harm they cause. In explicitly recognizing legal consequences for “peoples and individuals”, the ICJ reaffirmed communities as direct rights-holders for such reparations.
How the fund should respond to ICJ decision
As board members consider the fund’s future, they must ensure that loss and damage responses are fully consistent with international law. This will be essential to overcoming longstanding impasses and to building an institution that is founded on justice.
First and foremost, states have a duty to provide resources at the scale of loss and damage needs, based on their Common But Differentiated Responsibilities. This has important implications for the upcoming resource mobilization strategy for the FRLD, both in terms of the scale that it needs to aim for – as needs are in the hundreds of billions – and how to reach it.
Rich nations accused of delaying loss and damage fund with slow payments
The board must move beyond voluntary contributions and periodic pledging conferences to clarifying differentiated obligations, with concrete pathways to make polluters pay and hold big polluters accountable.
Second, all those harmed by the climate crisis have a right to remedy – not charitable assistance. This has critical implications for decisions on access to the fund.
Bureaucratic rules and the limitations imposed by the World Bank as the FRLD’s trustee cannot stand in the way of all climate-vulnerable developing countries having direct access to the fund. Moreover, as the ICJ affirmed, the legal consequences of states’ wrongful acts extend to peoples and individuals, making direct community access a matter of right rather than discretion.
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Third, international human rights law must guide loss and damage responses as a legal requirement, not as best practice. The fund’s start-up phase and long-term operations should recognize that losses and damages are, first and foremost, human rights violations and adjust accordingly.
Loss and damage needs assessments must explicitly include human rights criteria and non-economic loss and damage. The fund must urgently develop policies and do-no-harm frameworks that ensure inclusive, participatory, and accountable operations that protect ecosystems and human rights, including Indigenous Peoples’ rights.
‘There is no going back’
The momentum for climate justice needs to continue after the fund’s board meeting. At COP30 in Belém, Brazil, states are expected to finally deliver action consistent with their legal obligations on mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.
Beyond COP30, the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has announced its push for a new UN General Assembly resolution to endorse and operationalize the ICJ’s advisory opinion.
All states have agreed that guidance from the ICJ on legal climate obligations was necessary. Now, they must deliver urgent, tangible solutions for the communities most affected by the climate crisis. The legal landscape has shifted – there is no going back to a world where climate accountability can be evaded.
Liane Schalatek is associate director of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Washington DC. Lien Vandamme is a senior campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). Monica Iyer is an assistant professor at the Georgia State University College of Law. Rajib Ghosal is an international consultant working on climate justice and development. Teo Ormond-Skeaping is a coordinator of advocacy and outreach at the Loss and Damage Collaboration. Isatis M. Cintron is a climate justice postdoctoral researcher and director of the ACE Observatory.
The post The ICJ climate ruling has major implications for the loss and damage fund appeared first on Climate Home News.
The ICJ climate ruling has major implications for the loss and damage fund
Climate Change
After a week of plenty of activity and drama for Greenpeace at sea, I felt like writing to you on a much quieter theme…
Do you have a favourite book, poem or story about the ocean?
When I was very small, it was the TimeLife book of The Fishes, by F. D. Ommanney, which I remember endlessly poring over, my child’s mind gripped, in total fascination. The cover illustration showed a shoal of barracuda, mid-water and heading upwards, lit up as an iridescent blue by a column of sunlight. Oddly, it is only the cover and the illustrations of the deep sea creatures which I now remember—but I loved that book, as the weakened spine, blunted pages and dog-eared corners attested.
The Fishes has been on my mind recently, because I’ve been working with some dear friends on our own illustrated oceans book, to be published by Upswell Publishing. The book is called Scott Reef: Like Nowhere Else on Earth, and I want to share with you a bit of the story behind its creation.
Scott Reef is absolutely magnificent: Australia’s largest freestanding oceanic reef, brimming with life, including rare and threatened species such as a genetically distinct population of green sea turtles, pygmy blue whales and the wonderfully elegant dusky sea snake. But Scott Reef isn’t near our capital cities; it is way off the north-west coast of WA. And it is threatened with devastation by Woodside, which wants to drill up to 57 toxic wells at the Reef for its vast, dirty Browse gas project.
One of the main challenges in the fight to save Scott Reef from being turned into an industrialised gas zone by Woodside is bringing this incredible location to life for people who haven’t actually experienced it first hand. Because despite its ecological significance and dazzling beauty, ‘Scott Reef’ is also—at least not yet—exactly a household name.
To help get over this barrier, Greenpeace has enabled a number of photographers to travel to Scott Reef by boat (including the Rainbow Warrior) to document its astonishing diversity of colour and life. We then brought these images together in a remarkable photobook, produced by our talented in-house team, which we’ve been putting into the hands of as many leaders as possible—including the MPs whose decisions can determine the Reef’s future.
Back in June this year, I was sharing a copy of our in-house book at a business gathering in Perth when someone pulled me aside. Had we thought about publishing the book commercially? Apart from anything else, he wanted to buy a copy himself! He had a point. We were proud of what we’d created, but a commercially published version could reach a much wider audience and have even greater campaign impact. I immediately turned to my dear friend, Terri-ann White, who runs Upswell Publishing in WA, for advice.
Terri-ann has a huge heart and terrific vision. So many wonderful things in WA owe their existence to her doings, and, true to form, she was immediately encouraging and enthusiastic. “But,” she said, “it would add a whole new dimension if we had some words to accompany the incredible pictures.”
Fair enough, I thought. I could ask a few authors.
“And when would you like it published?” she asked.
“Ideally November,” I answered sheepishly.
Now, in publishing terms, nobody goes from idea to finished work, beautifully produced by a commercial publisher, in just four months. It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen. A book of this scale would ordinarily take nine months, I was told. But Terri-ann was undeterred. “If you can get a rapid turnaround on the writing, I will give it a shot.”
Over the following few days, I sent out 24 emails to prospective writers. To my joy and surprise 23 of them responded almost immediately with an enthusiastic yes!
Terri-ann was somewhat alarmed and perplexed when I told her the good news… we’d discussed a few authors, not more than twenty! “Impossible,” she texted. “Editing is important and you are talking about thousands of words!” But I also know Terri-ann. She does the impossible. And so, here we are… Terri-ann is going to hit that improbable deadline. Scott Reef: Like Nowhere Else on Earth will be on shelves in November.
The contributors are a wonderfully diverse bunch, united by their enthusiasm for Scott Reef — and their extraordinary speed!
It’s a brilliant mix. The book brings together national icons like Peter Garrett, Tim Winton, Mick Dodson, Janet Holmes à Court and Fiona Stanley; the intellectual heft of professors Frank Bongiorno, Jessica Meeuwig, Rick Steiner and Samantha Hepburn; the poetic vision of Prema Arasu, Berndt Sellheim and Saadiah Freeman; the field expertise and passionate first hand witnessing of Imogen Zethoven, Tooni Mahto, Ben Fitzpatrick, Geoff Bice, Olaf Meynecke, Paul Gamblin, Sarah Gittoes and Hayley Baillie; and the determination of emerging activist voices Jackson Reid and Emma Sangalli.
Their elegant words wrap themselves around the sheer wonder of the underwater world, brought to life by the work of the photographers — of whom one, Wendy Mitchell, has also contributed a wonderful essay.
Terri-ann showed me the full physical proofs this week and they are breathtaking. This book contains some of my absolute favourite images of wildlife beneath the waves -– and believe me, after almost 20 years at Greenpeace, I’ve been privileged enough to see some remarkable shots! The essays bring a whole new depth and richness to the story of Scott Reef.
If I am being honest, and maybe a bit sentimental, I hope that a four or five-year-old child somewhere in Australia will spend part of their summer holidays turning the pages of this book, wide-eyed with curiosity and awe at the beauty and strangeness of the creatures that call our oceans home.
Our shared commitment is to make sure that, as those children grow up, the wonders of Scott Reef will exist not just in the pages of the book, but out there in the wild waters off north-western Australia—alive, thriving, and every bit as extraordinary as they are today; a living wonder beneath the waves.
Pre-orders of Scott Reef: Like Nowhere Else on Earth are available here.
Q & A
Sometimes you get asked a question so often that you decide to produce a report to answer it!
We know there is strong public opposition to voter opposition to gas drilling at Scott Reef and fracking in the Kimberley in Western Australia. But I am frequently asked whether, even if people don’t want it, more gas drilling is a necessary evil to sustain WA’s prosperity?
The short answer is an unequivocal ‘No’. The longer answer is our new report, From Gas to Green: Building Western Australia’s Future State, which makes the comprehensive case that Asia’s gas market is declining — while WA has an enormous untapped opportunity to become a global leader in green industries and exports, helping drive the region’s shift away from fossil fuels. The faster that WA embarks on a decisive shift away from gas—and that includes no fracking in the Kimberley, or drilling at Scott Reef — so much the better for the state’s people, ecology and economy.
For the first time, new-energy vehicles (NEVs) made up 67% of new car sales in China in September, according to the latest data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).
The figures show that NEVs, which include battery electric cars and plug-in hybrids, captured a record share of sales, even though fewer were sold than last year.
This is because sales of combustion-engine cars are falling steeply, a trend that the CPCA has attributed to rising petrol prices following the start of the Hormuz crisis.
Indeed, sales of fuel-only cars were down 31% year-on-year in the first nine months of 2026, with plug-in hybrid sales down 26% – whereas battery EV sales were only down 4%.
One analyst tells Carbon Brief that China’s rapidly growing EV fleet has offset demand for 143m barrels of oil since the start of the Hormuz crisis.
Another says that the crisis is “reinforcing China’s electrification of road transport”.
Meanwhile, amid slowing domestic sales, Chinese carmakers’ exports of NEVs more than doubled [in 2026 to date / in September] from a year earlier.
NEV record
A record two out of every three cars sold in September in China were NEVs, according to CPCA data, as shown in the figure below.
(NEVs predominantly include battery electric vehicles – BEVs – and plug-in hybrids – PHEVs. BEVs only run on electricity, whereas PHEVs also have a combustion engine.)
This marks a rapid rise for NEVs from just 6% of new car sales in 2020 up to 58% in 2026 to date – and a record 67% in the month of September.
This year, NEVs’ share of sales has also bounced back from a low of 39% in January, after the full purchase tax exemption that had been in place for more than a decade came to an end in December 2025.
The gain in NEV share in 2026 has come amid a slowdown across the wider domestic passenger-car market, which has hit sales of combustion-engine vehicles particularly hard.
This September, passenger-car retail sales across all categories declined, with overall sales volumes falling 28% year-on-year.
The contraction was led by combustion-engine vehicles, which saw sales fall 43% year-on-year in September and 31% in 2026 to date.
However, sales of PHEVs also fell by 36% year-on-year in September and by 26% in 2026 to date. By comparison, BEVs performed better, although sales still declined 8.5% from a year earlier in September and 4% in 2026 to date.
As a result, NEV sales overall fell by 17% in September and 13% in 2026 to date.
While the market changes in 202