SHARM EL SHEIKH (Politico/AFP) – Governments around the world reached a preliminary deal Saturday on paying the most vulnerable nations for the damage they’re suffering from climate change, negotiators said near the end of talks in the Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh.
Seve Paeniu, finance minister of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, confirmed Saturday that a deal had been reached to create a fund for payments, one of the most contentious issues at this month’s United Nations climate summit in Egypt.
Such an agreement would be a significant reversal from the United States, which for decades has opposed the idea of paying countries for climate damage out of concern it would expose the world’s largest climate change driver to legal action. But it capitalizes on President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, which has sought to ensure that those most vulnerable to pollution and rising seas, hotter temperatures and deeper drought receive assistance.
The talks in Egypt set the stage for more conclusive negotiations at the next UN climate summit, scheduled for late 2023 in the United Arab Emirates. Those talks will try to develop more details on the design of the new fund.
But with major aspects of the negotiations still ongoing in Sharm El-Sheikh, particularly on a program to encourage steeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, who is leading the talks, cautioned against banking any single aspect of the agreement.
“I don’t want to speculate or to prejudice the ongoing discussions and negotiations,” he said.
Richer countries, which have previously baulked at the issue over fears of open-ended liability, have accepted that countries in the crosshairs of increasingly destructive climate-driven disasters need funding help, but have called for a broader set of donors -- and prioritizing the most climate-vulnerable countries as recipients.
They are also keen to steer the focus onto other critical issues, like finding agreement on emissions-cutting ambitions and reaffirming a goal to limit average warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, which scientists say is a safer guardrail to avoid the most dangerous impacts.
A cascade of climate-driven extremes in recent months -- from floods in Pakistan and Nigeria to heatwaves and droughts across the world -- have shone a spotlight on the ferocious impacts of a warming world for emerging economies, as well as small island states threatened by sea level rise.