SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — It was a total loss, the kind often overlooked in big, impersonal statistics, like $40 billion in damage from Pakistan’s floods this summer that submerged a third of the nation.
“We lost everything, our house and our possessions,” said Taj Mai, a mother of seven who is four months pregnant and is in a flood relief camp in Pakistan’s Punjab province. “At least in a camp our children will get food and milk.”
This is the human side of a contentious issue that is likely to dominate climate talks in Egypt this month. It’s about big money, justice, blame and taking responsibility. Extreme weather is getting worse as the world warms, with one study estimating that human-caused climate change increased flood-causing rainfall in Pakistan by up to 50%.
As Pakistan was flooded, six energy companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Saudi Aramco and Total Energies) made $97.49 billion in profits from July to September. Poorer nations, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, European leaders and US President Joe Biden are calling on fossil fuel companies to pay windfall profits tax. Many want some of that money, along with additional aid from the wealthy nations that dumped most of the heat-trapping gases, to be used to pay countries that have been victims of past pollution, such as Pakistan.
The issue of polluters paying for their climate disasters is called loss and damage in international climate negotiations. It’s about repairs.
“Loss and damage is going to be the priority and the determining factor of whether COP27 is successful or not,” said Kenyan climate activist Elizabeth Wathuti, referring to the climate talks in Egypt. Senior United Nations officials say they are looking for “something significant in loss and damage” and were “certainly encouraged” by negotiations on Friday, Saturday and Sunday that put the issue on the meeting’s agenda.
The money for loss and damage is different from two other financial aid systems that already exist to help poorer nations develop carbon-free energy and adapt to future warming.
Since 2009, the world’s rich nations have promised to spend $100 billion on climate aid for poor nations, with most of it going to help them get off coal, oil and natural gas and build greener energy systems. Officials now want half of that to go toward building systems to help adapt to future weather disasters.
None of the financial commitments have yet been met, but none address the problem of paying for current and past climate disasters, such as heat waves in India, floods in Pakistan and droughts in Africa.
“Our current levels of global warming of 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) have already caused widespread and dangerous loss and damage to nature and billions of people,” said Climate Analytics scientist Adelle Thomas of the Bahamas.
“Loss and damage are unavoidable and unevenly distributed” with the poorest nations, the elderly, the poor and the vulnerable bearing the brunt, he said.
After years of not wanting to talk about reparations in climate talks, US and European officials say they are willing to have discussions about loss and damage. But the US, the biggest historical carbon polluter, will not accept anything that sounds like responsibility, said special envoy John Kerry.
US emissions that created warmer temperatures caused at least $32 billion in damage to Pakistan’s gross domestic product between 1990 and 2014, according to calculations by Dartmouth climate researchers Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin based on in past broadcasts. And that’s only based on temperature-oriented damage, not rain.
“Loss and damage is a way of both acknowledging past damage and compensating for that past damage,” Mankin said. “These damages are scientifically identifiable. And now it’s up to politics to defend that damage or remunerate that damage.”
The United States emits more carbon dioxide into the air from burning fossil fuels in 16 days than Pakistan does in a year, according to figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The executive director of the American Gas Association, Karen Harbert, said that Americans will not accept such payments to distant nations and that is not the way to think about the issue.
“It’s not just Pakistan. Let’s talk about Puerto Rico. Let’s talk about Louisiana. Other things that are happening here at home that we also need to pay attention to and help our fellow citizens,” Herbert said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“If there was an opportunity to talk to people in Pakistan, I would say… the solution is, first of all, you have the opportunity with natural gas to have a much cleaner electrical system than you have today,” he said.
But for Aaisa Bibi, a pregnant mother of four from Punjab province, cheaper, cleaner energy doesn’t mean much when her family has nowhere to live except a refugee camp.
“With less than 1% of global emissions, Pakistan is certainly not part of the climate change problem,” said Shabnam Baloch, director of the Pakistan International Red Cross, adding that people like Bibi are just trying to survive floods, heat waves. , droughts, poor crop yields, water scarcity and inflation.
In Kenya’s semi-arid Makueni county, where a devastating drought has raged for more than three years, goat and sheep farmer John Gichuki, 47, said: “It’s traumatizing to see your cattle dying of thirst and hunger.” .
Gichuki’s maize and pulse crops have failed four seasons in a row. “The farm is solely at the mercy of the weather,” he said.
In India, record heat linked to climate change caused deaths and ruined crops. Elsewhere it is the devastation of tropical cyclones that are wetter and stronger due to the burning of fossil fuels.
This global problem has a parallel within the United States in sometimes contentious discussions about paying for damages caused by slavery.
“In many ways, we’re talking about reparations,” said Sacoby Wilson, a professor of environmental health and justice at the University of Maryland. “It’s an appropriate term to use,” he said, because rich northern countries have reaped the benefits of fossil fuels, while the poorer global south bears the brunt of floods, droughts, climate refugees and famine.
The Barbados government has suggested changes to the way multinational development banks lend to poorer nations to account for climate vulnerability and disasters. Pakistan and others have called for debt relief.
It’s about “putting ourselves in other people’s shoes,” said Avinash Persaud, special envoy to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.
Persaud suggests a long-term tax on high oil, coal and natural gas prices, but reverse it. With today’s high energy prices, there would be no taxes, so inflation would not increase. But once fossil fuel prices drop 10%, 1% of the price drop will go into a fund to pay victims of climate loss and damage, without increasing the cost of living.
United Nations chief Guterres, who has called the move on loss and damage a “litmus test” for the success of Egypt’s climate conference, has appointed two high-level national officials to try to reach a deal: Germany’s climate envoy and former head of Greenpeace. Jennifer Morgan and the Chilean Environment Minister, Maisa Rojas.
“The fact that it has been adopted as an agenda item shows progress and the parties are taking a mature and constructive attitude towards this,” UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell told a news conference on Sunday. “This is a difficult subject area. It has been floating for more than thirty years. So the fact that it’s there as a substantive item on the agenda, I think that bodes well.”
“What will be most revealing is how those discussions progress in the substantive discussion over the next two weeks,” Stiell said.
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climate data journalists Mary Katherine Wildeman in Hartford, Connecticut, and Camille Fassett in Seattle; Wanjohi Kabukuru in Mombasa, Kenya; Frank Jordans in Berlin; Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington; Shazia Bhatti in Rajanpur, Pakistan; Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi and Megan Janetsky in Havana, Cuba contributed.
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Follow AP climate and environmental coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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