Dedicated to repairing climate disasters, the “loss and damage” fund was adopted to everyone’s surprise at the opening of COP 28 in Dubai.
COP28 opened with fanfare on Thursday in Dubai with the highly anticipated creation of a fund to compensate for climate losses and damage in vulnerable countries.
The major international climate conference was officially inaugurated in the oil and gas emirate, as the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2023 was expected to be the hottest year on record.
The first major step forward at COP28, the realization of the fund intended to finance climate “loss and damage” in vulnerable countries was adopted, a positive step in the hope of easing financial tensions between the North and the South, in parallel with the negotiations on fossil fuels.
This historic decision, greeted by a standing ovation from delegates from nearly 200 participating countries, concretizes the main result of COP27 in Egypt last year, where this fund was approved in principle but whose contours, much debated, were not had not yet been defined.
Billions or millions?
It remains to be seen how much will be allocated to this fund, provisionally hosted by the World Bank, against the initial advice of developing countries. The first promises began to rain in: 225 million euros for the European Union (including 100 million dollars announced by Germany), 100 million dollars for the Emirates, 10 million dollars for Japan, 17.5 million for the United States, up to 40 million pounds (about 50 million dollars) for the United Kingdom…
Developed countries are also pushing to broaden the donor base to wealthy emerging countries, such as China and Saudi Arabia.
Madeleine Diouf Sarr, president of the Least Developed Countries Group, which represents 46 of the poorest nations, welcomed a decision of “enormous significance for climate justice”. “But an empty fund cannot help our citizens,” she stressed, while the losses amount to hundreds of billions.
