Kabir Agarwal from The Wire is in Madrid, Spain, to cover COP 25. Follow our coverage of this important event here.
Madrid: Another bleak day at COP25 began with another bleak report. Germanwatch, a thinktank from Bonn, said on Wednesday that between 1999 and 2018, about 5 lakh people died around the world due to 12,000+ extreme weather events. India had the third-most deaths in this period, more than Myanmar and fewer than Russia.
Indeed, in 2018 alone, 2,081 people died in India due to natural events – the most in the world. (The toll due to the Kerala floods alone was 483.) Developing countries generally have a higher risk of fatalities in the event of a natural disaster because of their population density, lower quality of public infrastructure and healthcare systems that are unable to deal properly with subsequent epidemics, if any.
In the long term risk index calculated for the period from 1999 to 2018, seven of the top 10 are lower-income or lower-middle-income countries. India is at #17, in this case its large population working in its limited favour (because the number of deaths per lakh people is low).
At the same time, the intensity and increasing unpredictability of weather events hasn’t spared any developed nations either. Germany is one of the most developed countries in the world and the third-most number of people (1,246) died there in 2018 due to natural disasters, in this case dominated by the severe heat-waves in Europe.
Nonetheless, Germanwatch’s findings weren’t at all out of place at COP25, where it’s abundantly clear that the world’s developing countries are facing down the brunt of extreme weather events brought on by anthropogenic global heating, and by being in early stages of development, they have limited ability to deal with such threats.
There are two ways to respond to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation involves efforts to cut emissions and reduce the extent of warming. It’s the strategy that dominates the news.
Adaptation, which frequently slips under the radar, has to do with efforts to minimise damage caused by the climate emergency and to prepare for losses that will be incurred in future. For example, according to one estimate, the cost of damages due to natural disasters could be $1.2 trillion (Rs 85.83 lakh crore) a year by 2060. That was nearly Mexico’s GDP in 2018.
The road to mitigation is straightforward º at least since 2015, when the Conference of Parties to the UN FCCC forged the Paris Agreement, and in terms of what we need to do. However, adaptation is becoming more important by the day because most of the world’s governments have thus far been awful with the mitigation part itself. Human activities are emitting more and more greenhouse gases, not less, every year. Scientists have calculated the world’s surface as a result could warm by 3.2º C on average by 2100 – well beyond the threshold for a ‘climate catastrophe’ scenario.
Harjeet Singh, global climate change lead at Action Aid and an expert on climate-related losses, has argued that like the annual emissions gap report, which measures how well the world is reducing emissions relative to targets set in the Paris Agreement, that there needs to be an annual “loss and damage gap report” as well.
“We need to count how many people suffered because of extreme weather events and how many were adequately compensated. We are not here just to count how many solar panels are built. That is just one aspect,” Singh said.
He also criticised the prevailing institutional mechanisms of climate finance, which have to ensure money flows from developed to developing countries to help with mitigation and to offset losses. Article 8 of the Paris Agreement deals with the issue through the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM). The word ‘compensation’ appears once in the article’s text, only to clarify that the article doesn’t “involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation”.
“It is quite clear to me that we need to create a system. A new financing facility should be set up here.”
The representatives of developing countries have come prepared to push their counterparts from developed countries hard at COP25. Sources told The Wire that a group of 49 least-developed countries – 33 of which are from Africa – have proposed a separate finance mechanism be set up under the WIM. The African states, which make up one of the five principal regional party groups at the UN, back the pitch. Such unity is arguably non-optional because, to no one’s surprise, developed countries are completely against the idea.
“They are saying what they always say – that we will discuss finance but within the existing institutions,” a negotiator from one of the African nations told The Wire.
A UN committee covered some of this ground on Wednesday, in a dull technical session on “pre-2020 stocktake” to review progress on implementation before the Paris Agreement kicks in next year. Developed countries need to pledge to mobilise $100 billion per year by 2020 for climate action. So far, this green climate fund has received only $10 billion. Alina Averchenkova, a representative of a technical advisory team that works with the UN secretary general, said, “We face significant risk of the target not being met in 2020.”
Developed countries have more negotiating power at the table because of their economic clout. Mostly developing countries need compensation for losses. Developed countries have been very reluctant to cede too many concessions on this front. With climate finance only becoming more important, COP25 has come pre-built with tension. In the first plenary, for example, just before the opening ceremony, Latin American countries had insisted COP25’s agenda include consultations recognising their particular vulnerability to natural disasters and the extent to which developed countries should assume responsibility for this turn of events.
Carolina Schmidt, the president of COP 25 and Chile’s environment minister, had to turn the Latin America group down but not before agreeing to hold similar informal consultations for the group of African nations. The Latin American countries are understandably miffed. According to sources, they met yesterday with Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the UN FCCC, to object. “The Latin American countries are certainly not backing down and you are likely to hear more on this in the coming days,” a member of the Latin America group said.
Later on Wednesday, three women – Schmidt, Espinosa and Lorena Aguilar, the deputy minister of foreign affairs of Costa Rica, which is the co-chair for COP25 – told journalists that the UN understood the Latin Americans’ position, albeit without mentioning what happened at the first plenary.
As soon as they invited questions, an Argentinian reporter asked about the status of Latin America’s request. Schmidt deflected and spoke about how all countries are affected by climate change and that all of them have special needs. Her answer was disappointing not because she was evasive but because it showed just how difficult it is to bend the arc of justice, one way or another, even at a fundamentally Latin American summit with a Chilean president.
Kabir Agarwal is in Madrid at the invitation of the Global Editors Network to cover COP25.