Britain will face pressure this week from poorer countries to help them pay for future losses and damage caused by climate change.
World leaders will debate whether countries hit by floods, drought, hurricanes, and other events caused by climate change should give compensation.
The issue confirms parts of the plan for the Cop27 conference in Egypt despite resistance from wealthier countries. The EU and the US-led opposition to the calls.
The UK government welcomed the discussion about the issue but has not formally said whether it would be willing to support compensating poorer countries. One government source said it was unlikely to do so, given the existing strains on the foreign aid budget and the economy.
They discuss how to support poorer countries and if reparations from natural disasters paid for the damage.
Poorer nations have argued they are already suffering and will be worst affected by climate change.
Developing countries have historically contributed a proportion of the damaging emissions driving climate change – while 1% of the wealthiest global population account for more than double the combined emissions of the poorest 50%.
The money from the UK will help Asian and Pacific nations plan and invest in climate action to improve conservation and promote low-carbon development, the government said.
The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office described the £290m as new funding from the foreign aid budget. The government said last month that cuts to the UK foreign aid spending, to 0.5% of national income, until at least 2024-25.
Senior government climate change advisers previously warned the cuts showed the UK helping countries vulnerable to climate change ahead of COP26.
The summit continues Sunday talks focusing on how to limit global warming to the target of 1.5C.
How best to mitigateMonday will see negotiators discuss the impact of a warming planet, particularly for poorer countries.
Developing countries asked for $100bn (around £73bn at current exchange rates) annually to help reduce emissions adapted to climate change or reach net-zero targets on emissions well before 2050.
Pledges to wealthier nations in 2009 for $100bn. The plan to have it in place by 2020 target aim is to reach it by 2023 – an offer.
UN climate disaster appeals funding needed has soared by more than 800% in 20 years as global heating takes hold. But only about half of it is being met by rich countries, according to Oxfam.
Last year the third costliest was on record for extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and wildfires cost nearly double the given by donor nations.
While countries appealed for $63-75bn in emergency humanitarian aid over the last five years, they only received $35-42bn, leaving a shortfall piecemeal and painfully inadequate.
For the first sessions, the diplomat sits down in Bonn on Tuesday. Climates talk loss and all climate destruction to damage costs related. Danny Sriskandarajah of Oxfam GB chief executives described the financial gap as unacceptable.
He said: Weather-related disasters hit rich countries that were not only failing to provide sufficient humanitarian aid. They are also failing to keep their promise to provide $100bn a year to help developing countries adapt to the changing climate and blocking calls for finance to help them recover from impacts such as land that’s become unfarmable and infrastructure that was damaged.
But someone pays for floods and storms, droughts, and heat waves. The steepest costs of today’s climate without political intervention — loss of lives, cultures, or species that can never return, and damage to vital infrastructure that needs repairing after climate-driven disasters — will continue to be borne by populations that emit the least. A global agreement would come in with rich nations paying to compensate their poorer counterparts for climate destruction happening now.
If that is, there was such an agreement.
My ask was simple. That climate-affected country whose carbon footprint was less than 1% of global GHG emissions should not bear the burden of other people’s contributions,” Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister for climate change, said in an interview Friday on Bloomberg TV. Here they were afflicted with an event. Catastrophes that nobody had seen before in living memory. We were bearing the burden of it lovely on our own with some help from friends.”
Many wealthy nations, including the US, remain dead set against accords that enshrine loss-and-damage mechanisms and establish formal financial obligations. The phrase triggering to negotiators the UN-backed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has long avoided using it. From February reference an IPCC report and damages — even that near-usage prompted a push by.
There are exceptions: Denmark recently became the .to pledge to fund $13 million toward loss and damage. Nations funding usually keeps their position offstage at a diplomatic forum like the upcoming UN conference in Egypt. This resistance briefly burst into view during a public appearance last month by John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate change.
“What will you be doing to step up asked Farhana Yamin, a Pakistan-born British environmental lawyer and a key author of the 2015 Paris Agreement who was in the audience at a New York Times, where Kerry had been speaking. The US diplomat replied resources would be better spent preventing future emissions and adapting to climate extremes. Then he punctured normally restrained statements. “You tell me the government in the world that has trillions of dollars because that’s what it costs,” Kerry said of loss and damage. He added that he would not feel guilty about it.
Diplomats from wealthy nations have lately seemed attuned to the inevitabilities that climate reparations will command significant attention at COP27. Coincidentally Pakistan holds the rotating leadership role in what will be the largest negotiating bloc. And the conference will take place in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, the host making a loud advocate in a continent where compensation for climate impacts is needed.
No matter how clear was not gaining ground the moral case. “Those suffering the most consequences are not responsible for creating the crisis, which puts the onus on those who were responsible European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans told an audience in September at the Africa Adaptation Summit. “I have to say, many of our citizens of Europe will not buy this argument today because their worries are linked to their existence in this energy crisis, in this food crisis, in this inflation crisis.”
