Nine months after its creation at last year’s COP28 climate summit, the long-promised Loss & Damage Fund is being implemented, but not at the pace or scale that countries on the frontlines of the climate crisis need.
News that it could be close to a year before the Loss & Damage Fund, launched last November in Dubai, releases actual dollars was met with dismay by climate-vulnerable countries at a mid-July meeting of the fund’s delegates and steering committee, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We cannot wait until the end of 2025 for the first funds to get out the door,” Adao Soares Barbosa, a committee member from East Timor, told AFP. “Loss and damage isn’t waiting for us.”
The committee responsible for implementing the fund is still wrangling about the fine print, even as escalating climate impacts make clear the need for billions of solid dollars now.
The fund’s members sat down to the second set of talks since COP28, just days after Hurricane Beryl chewed through communities across the Caribbean and the Southwestern United States.
Barbadian fund member Elizabeth Thompson reminded her peers that damages from this single Category Five hurricane stand at “multiple billion dollars.”
“In five islands of the Grenadines, 90% of the housing is gone. Houses look like packs of cards and strips of wood, roofs are gone, trees are gone, there is no food, there is no water, there is no power,” Thompson told the meeting.
“We cannot keep talking while people live and die in a crisis that they do not cause.”
The year to date has seen multiple extreme weather events, including serial heatwaves that tormented hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable citizens for weeks on end, killing thousands.
According to an official document seen by AFP, the fund is pushing to approve the release of monies “as soon as possible, but realistically by mid-2025.”
Whenever the cash does arrive, currently pledged dollars amount to a trickle where an ocean of aid is required, reports AFP.
Pledges currently stand just shy of US$670 million, far below the $400 billion per year that some experts say will be required to give developing countries a fighting chance of weathering climate-related disasters.
As an example, AFP cites the floods that devastated Pakistan in 2022, causing “more than $30 billion in damages and economic losses.”
Just how the fund should allocate its monies remains a “contentious” discussion amongst the delegates, says AFP. An open letter signed by more than 350 non-governmental organizations throws its support behind demands that “a substantial share of the money be made directly available as small grants to local communities and Indigenous groups.”
The Loss & Damage Youth Coalition is also demanding that any plans to change the name of the fund be quashed. “Any derogatory names such as ‘climate change response fund’ will be unacceptable as it will reduce the weight of the nature of the fund,” writes the LDYC.
