Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, is heading to Egypt for the UN COP27 climate summit with one goal: finally getting the world to commit to helping countries like hers deal with the growing “loss and damage” caused by global warming.
As richer nations focus on debating how to slow rising temperatures while still producing the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions, poorer places are already suffering the consequences of a hotter climate and more extreme weather, from worsening floods and droughts to deadly heat and rising sea levels.
Pakistan has been battered by back-to-back climate catastrophes in recent years – floods, heatwaves and forest fires – and is struggling to find the funding it needs to recover from unprecedented flooding that started in June, inundating a third of the country.
“We have repeatedly made the moral case for loss and damage compensations at different platforms,” Rehman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We will deliver the same message at COP27.”
“Loss and damage” refers to the harm and destruction that happens when people and places are not prepared for climate-driven impacts, and have not or cannot adjust the way they live to protect themselves from longer-term shifts, according to Reuters.
Nine years ago, UN climate negotiators agreed to set up a formal mechanism to tackle loss and damage – but, apart from a donor-backed effort to boost insurance against weather disasters in developing countries, little has happened since.
That was mainly because rich governments did not want to be held financially liable for the impacts of their historically high emissions, although some are now softening their opposition to find funding to address loss and damage, as vulnerable people are being hit hard in all parts of the world.
Rehman, alongside other officials and climate experts in Pakistan, are calling for the establishment of a dedicated “Loss and Damage Finance Facility”.
They see COP27 as an opportunity not only for governments to set up such a fund but also to commit an amount to launch it.
Pakistan is a “climate victim” that has grabbed the world’s attention and empathy – and is also currently chairing the G77 and China, an alliance of developing countries that is a key player at the COP summits, noted Malik Amin Aslam, an environmentalist and former Pakistan climate change minister.
That puts it in a unique position to “not only highlight the catastrophic reality of climate change, but also directly influence the COP process to secure some concrete results”, he said.
“Pakistan should not leave the table without securing that (loss and damage fund),” Aslam added. “Anything short of that will be a failure.”
