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Earlier this month, on Nov 3rd, the French government opened up applications for $60 million in reparations for American and other non-French Holocaust survivors who were transported by French trains to concentration camps during World War II.
This celebrated "measure of justice" was decades in the making--seven decades to be exact.
France's human rights ambassador Patrizianna Sparacino-Thiella, marked the initial announcement last year as "a further contribution to recognizing France's commitment to facing up to its historic responsibilities." After 70 years, the French foreign ministry admitted that France was responsible and would "assume the consequences."
And here we are, on the road to the Paris Climate Summit--with poor countries on the edge of an unraveling planet, demanding in ever louder voices some kind of reparations for the unavoidable, inevitable destructions that wealthier, carbon-polluting nations have wrought upon the world.
"Loss and damage is part of the climate justice we are asking for. We are at the brink of survival while rich countries continue to pollute and harm us. It needs to stop. We need to make them accountable." --Ayeen Karunungan, Philippines climate activistSpecifically, poor countries are fighting for a powerful agreement on what is called "Loss and Damage."
Loss and Damage refers to the waves and wildfires and other climate wrecking balls we can't stop anymore, largely because we've dragged our feet as a planet for over twenty years on climate action. It's about getting poor countries, who've contributed very little to the climate crisis some measures of justice for the climate impacts for which no level of preemptive "adaptation" can account.
Given its central importance among the world's most vulnerable countries, ActionAid's Harjeet Singh says a lack of progress on Loss and Damage could "absolutely" trigger a breakdown of the upcoming talks in Paris.
Ambassador Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa, who leads the G77 + China bloc (134 developing nations), said "Loss and damage is not optional. We experience in our hearts the broad spectrum of climate change impacts. We are trying to see loss and damage have a role in this agreement."
Meanwhile, Ambassador Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, who leads the 37-country Small Island Bloc, AOSIS, said Loss and Damage is a must have. "There has to be a home for loss-and-damage in the agreement."
The US, on the other hand, is not pleased about potentially paying up.
Todd Stern, the US climate envoy, told the press in late October that he supports Loss and Damage "as an idea" but said the United States, simply put, "is not going to accept compensation and liability being in the agreement."
Stern's words echo his message at the last iconic climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, saying the U.S. would acknowledge responsibility, but not culpability. "We absolutely recognize our historical role in putting emissions in the atmosphere that are there now. But the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I categorically reject that."
If the U.S. and other wealthy allies like Australia and surprisingly Switzerland continue to insist on cleaving compensation from Loss and Damage, which seems very likely, the fight will be to salvage something that still gives the whole issue enough momentum to carry forward in the years ahead.
One battlefront involves getting rich countries to admit their historical responsibility for the glut of carbon emissions. Another front involves getting Loss and Damage out from under the "Adaptation" category in the UN framework, where it stands to be confused with preparing for the worst, instead of compensating for the unimaginable.
As the Angolan diplomat Giza Gaspar Martins, who leads the 48 least developed countries bloc, recently told Reuters: "(Loss and damage) is when you can no longer adapt to any potential change - that reality is deserving of special consideration."
A more tangible fight in the the Loss and Damage negotiations involves fighting for a UN climate refugee program--called "displacement coordination facility" in the UNFCCC lexicon--which could assist with emergency relief, migration support, and planned relocations for populations who are literally washed away, or whose crops just don't cut it anymore. (Something like this, one could aruge, may have been handy for the current Syrian refugee crisis.)
Negotiations will surely get heated, but all the negotiating in the world tends to overlook how very real the need for a Loss and Damage program already is.
Ayeen Karunungan, a Philippines climate justice advocate, felt Loss and Damage up close in late 2013.
Karunungan witnessed how Typhoon Haiyan, which claimed over 6,300 lives, devastated her home country of the Philippines. "I have met people who lost their whole family to Haiyan, who lost their whole agricultural lands, who were left with nothing," she said.
For Karunungan, the concept of Loss and Damage is a matter of justice, not for some later date, but for the here and now.
"If climate change is human induced, and it is, someone has to be responsible for all this damage," she continued. "Loss and damage is part of the climate justice we are asking for. We are at the brink of survival while rich countries continue to pollute and harm us. It needs to stop. We need to make them accountable."
When Yeb Sano, the Philippines negotiator took the stage at the climate talks in 2013, his words came in tears. After describing the "hellstorm"" of Haiyan that had just unleashed devastation upon his island home, he declared that it was "time to confront the issue of loss and damage."
"It is now too late, too late to talk about the world being able to rely on developed countries to solve the climate crisis," Sano declared. "We have entered a new era that demands global solidarity."
The same year Haiyan took 6,300 lives in the Philippines, the US spewed 6,673 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into the atmosphere, and while they were at it, showered $21.6 billion in subsidies on the fossil fuel industry.
Because of the bullish insistence by the U.S. and other wealthy nations against paying for the damage of historic pollution, the current Paris draft makes no mention of actual reparations or clear compensation language. As it stands, the G77 plus China bloc was able to squeeze different scenarios on Loss and Damage into brackets in the latest draft for future debate in Paris.
Almost all of the bracketed ideas on Loss and Damage are building blocks to further mechanisms and frameworks that may one day be able to deliver real support and perhaps real compensation. In other words, even if the G77 is able to move forward on their already weakened positions, it would take years or far more likely many painfully long decades to even build a working framework for doling out "measures of justice" for those who've lost everything.
It took well over half a century for one country to take responsibility and "assume the consequences" for something that was a very obvious evil--one not nearly as complex as getting the world's nations to match their historical carbon emissions with hunks of responsibility for a broken world, and then figure out shares of reparations and so on from there.
Unfortunately, we don't have 70 years for the survivors of a climate nightmare-made world. Knowing how long it took France to realize its latest reparations means Paris needs to find some equivalent to Godspeed on Loss and Damage.
The final round of preliminary climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany came to a close Friday without much consensus on some of the most pressing issues, including cementing wealthy nations' financial commitments to guarantee assistance for developing nations grappling with the impacts of global warming.
The talks in Bonn represented the last chance for United Nations (UN) member states to settle on a draft climate treaty ahead of the upcoming COP21 talks in Paris, where leaders will finalize a global agreement on curbing global warming.
Without substantial progress, climate advocacy groups said Friday, frontline communities around the globe face imminent threats.
"The deplorable inaction at the climate negotiations is a calamity for people across the world," said Dipti Bhatnagar, Friends of the Earth International's climate justice and energy coordinator. "We are facing a planetary emergency with floods, storms, droughts and rising seas causing devastation. The risk of irreversible climate change draws ever closer, and hundreds of thousands of people have already paid with their lives."
As the talks concluded, delegates expressed ongoing concerns that wealthy nations were still attempting to foist their aid obligations onto independent financiers like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which the Group of 77 (G77) plus China coalition of developing nations said was an underhanded attempt to evade financial responsibilities at any cost--even if it meant derailing the entire treaty process.
Mattias Soderberg, chair of the ACT Alliance climate change advisory group, toldDeutsche Welle the pace of the talks was frustrating and disappointing.
"From our perspective, where we work with those who are affected by climate change, the progress is far from enough," Soderberg said. "Parties need to leave their comfort zones, to look for common understanding. Now they stay in their corners, sticking to old positions."
Susann Scherbarth, climate justice and energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, added, "We need a fair agreement, a fair process and fair shares of climate action. What we have on the negotiation table now is increased effort by more than 140 developing countries but it won't avoid catastrophic climate change unless rich countries have a dramatic change of heart. We need rich countries to urgently commit to do their fair share."
The draft agreement that came out of Bonn was still riddled with "technical disagreements" and was unlikely to provide much guidance to minsters during the Paris talks, Soderberg said.
"An example is on loss and damage [where adaptation to climate change is no longer possible]. Some rich countries want to cut it out, while developing countries, led by LDCs [least developed countries] and small islands, want to include ambitious text. There is no middle ground," he said.
Harjeet Singh, climate policy manager for ActionAid, said the week's events showed "there is still a mountain to climb before a deal emerges on the horizon at the Paris summit in December."
"It seems that the [European Union] forgot its claim of standing together with the world's poor and vulnerable," Singh added. "For months it has remained undecided on how the Paris deal will help poor communities already being battered by climate change. The EU hangs at the threshold dithering on whether and how it should go out and help the people in the storm."
G77 delegates have asserted that the rift was not simply a disagreement between ministers--it was a matter of life and death. "It is not a photo opportunity; it is not an instagram or selfie moment. It is a reality we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis," said G77 chair and South African climate envoy Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko.
"Whether Paris succeeds or not will depend on what we have as part of the core agreement on finance," she said during a press conference Thursday.
Jamie Henn, strategy and communications director for climate advocacy group 350.org, reported from Bonn on Friday that the week had been "frustrating" for climate ministers and that many disagreements remained over the "level of ambition" by world leaders to move away from fossil fuels and financial support for developing countries.
He also said there were "huge preparations under way" for direct actions outside of the COP21 summit, including marches and other demonstrations around the world.
"No matter where you are, you can play a huge role in this movement by continuing to keep pressure up for strong action in Paris and beyond.... The only way we're going to see progress is with a strong grassroots movement that can take on the power of the fossil fuel industry," he said.
Scherbarth added, "People will have the last word in Paris. But the demonstrations in Paris will not be the end. The struggle will continue, as it must, because the job will not be done in Paris."
Watch Henn's video below:
Rich nations are blockading efforts to reach consensus on financial climate pledges in Bonn, Germany this week as the upcoming United Nations climate talks approach--a move which could derail the entire process, a bloc of developing nations said Thursday.
The Group of 77 (G77) and China, a coalition of nations and alliances that represent more than 80 percent of the world's population, said wealthy UN member states were shirking their financial responsibilities to help developing nations stave off the impacts of climate change and attempting to shift those obligations onto institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The latest blueprint of climate pledges reportedly omits key mechanisms that were included in previous drafts, such as financing for poorer countries and accountability for wealthier ones, according toAllAfrica.
"When you take out the issues of others, you disenfranchise them, and disempower those who suffer the most," said G77 chair and South Africa climate envoy Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko.
With the COP21 talks approaching fast, and no more chances to negotiate after the Bonn session ends this week, those roadblocks could mean a difference of life or death for frontline nations, Mxakato-Diseko said.
"It's a matter of life or death...and we are dead serious," Mxakato-Diseko told journalists in a media briefing on Thursday. While the G77 had come to an agreement on financial positions, she said, "developed countries have not negotiated, in the hope that it will be sorted [out] external to the agreement, where we are weakest."
Legally binding financial mandates for wealthy nations must be included in the agreement to guarantee that frontline countries actually receive funds to address the impacts of climate change, Mxakato-Diseko continued. "Otherwise we are left to the whim of charity, the whim of individual countries to decide if and when [to pay], depending on the circumstances."
According to a recent report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a number of sources including government funds, private institutions, and development banks raised $62.8 billion in 2014 to stock up the climate war chest. Developed nations previously swore to mobilize $100 billion by 2020 to help frontline countries adapt to the impacts of global warming, such as sea level rise.
But on Thursday, the G77 said those figures were not accounted for and that the fine print included 'development aid' as a form of financial contribution, which raises "serious and valid concerns over the way that $62 billion figure was arrived at," said Angolan diplomat Giza Gaspar Martins. "It accounts for credit guarantees, loans that have to be repaid."
And because the World Bank and IMF, as private institutions, are not going to be bound by the COP21 climate agreement, delegates say there would be no way to guarantee that those funds would ever reach the developing nations.
The World Bank is "a competitor with developing countries for finance to give to us on conditions that are unregulated," while the IMF "has no status in the agreement," Mxakato-Diseko said. "Beneath the darkness, where there is no scrutiny from civil society, the hope is that our will will be bent so much that we are tired, we give up and then the issue is resolved by announcements that are external" to the UN climate process.
Gurdial Singh Nijar, a spokesperson for the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) coalition--which includes Argentina, China, India, Iran, and Vietnam, among others--told journalists that the new draft "completely ignored the submissions of G77 on finance."
"We demand that the text be balanced for negotiations to commence," Nijar said.
Harjeet Singh, policy manager for the humanitarian organization ActionAid, explained the G77's position this way: "If your house goes up in flames, the first thing you do is put the fire out. Developing countries are already fighting the fires of climate change and so are demanding strategies and money to deal with its impact. For rich nations who have the money, technology and skills, the devastation of climate change is not a pressing issue."
"The current climate talks are reflecting the contrasting order of priority of issues between developed and developing nations," Singh said. "Rich nations need to recognize the crisis is here and now. The money to prepare for and deal with climate impacts must be at the center of the deal in Paris."
The G77's call follows a report released Monday that found the U.S. and other wealthy nations' climate pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions were not enough to prevent an average surface temperature warming of 2degC, the agreed threshold to prevent irreparable global warming and extreme weather events.
The success of COP21, said Mxakato-Diseko, will be judged by "what will be contained inside" the final accord.