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The United Nations climate conference will take place this year in Egypt. The African country, along with other developing countries, wants to put the issue of loss and damage at the center of the negotiations. But this point in the climate negotiations provokes reluctance among the most industrialized countries, since it would imply economic reparations for the countries most vulnerable to climate change.
It was a media blow and at the same time a desperate cry. During the last climate conference in Glasgow, the foreign minister of another Pacific archipelago, the Tuvalu Islands, recorded a message with feet in the water to make delegations around the world aware of the existential threat posed by rising ocean levels in their country.
And it is that global warming, product of excessive emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, causes two phenomena: the expansion of the ocean, and the melting glacier causing the global increase in water level.
In 2016, Australian researchers reported that the sea level in the Solomon Islands had risen about 10mm per year over the past two decades. The figure seems minimal, but erosion and rising waters submerged five islands of the Pacific archipelago that has territories at sea level.
The trend could worsen in the coming decades: according to the group of international climate experts, global sea level could rise about 77 cm by 2100 compared to the beginning of the century. The rise could reach 110 cm if the current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions is not corrected.
Relocate a country in the metaverse
Several Pacific island states have already recorded losses of habitable or agricultural land. Faced with this threat, a Tuvaluan entrepreneur of new technologies, George Siosi Samuels, had a curious idea, but one that illustrates the existential threat to which certain nations are exposed: to save the culture, history, oral tradition of their archipelago before to disappear under the waters, proposes to replicate the country in the metaversethe virtual world of the Meta company, the mother house of Facebook.
With the disappearance of territory, the destruction of property and land, the exile of families due to the consequences of climate change, the island countries were the first to launch a cry of alert at climate conferences. And this year, at the COP27 that will take place in Egypt, the issue of loss and damage will be one of the central issues of the negotiations with the adaptation to climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which is called “mitigation”.
It was the Vanuatu islands that began to promote the concept of loss and damage due to climate change, recalls Alejandro Alemán, coordinator of the Climate Action Network, an environmental defense coalition that brings together dozens of NGOs in more than 14 countries. Latin America and the Caribbean.
“It’s a small Pacific island state that started talking about loss and damage in the 1990s when it saw rising sea levels eating away at its coastline. Vanuatu said ‘adaptation is not possible here’”.
“Sea level rises generate not only losses of coastlines and farmland, but also salinification of aquifers,” emphasizes Alemán.
Interviewed on the eve of his departure for the Cop 27 climate conference in Egypt, environmental activist Alejandro Alemán told RFI why the NGOs and the most vulnerable countries insist that the concept of damage and loss be a central issue on the negotiating agenda.
“For the Pacific islands, the issue of loss and damage and the need to address some kind of responsibility of the largest global polluters towards these severely affected populations, is extremely important.”
“When the impacts of climate change exceed the possibilities of adaptation, we speak of loss and damage: prolonged droughts, hurricanes that devastate infrastructure, lives, cultural heritage”, exemplifies the activist.
Throughout the climate conferences, however, the issue has become a bone of contention between rich and poor countries.
“For years, this discussion has been postponed, particularly due to the greater global emissions of greenhouse gases”, recalls Alejandro Alemán.
“The small island states through the G77+China have had several attempts to introduce the issue on the agenda of the climate change convention and in the negotiations, with a strong opposition mainly from the United States and, behind, from the European Union that have so far prevented us from assuming any type of legal responsibility or compensation for the damage caused to these countries.”
Egypt, which chairs this year’s climate negotiations, wants to insist precisely on the chapter on loss and damage.
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After almost 30 years of negotiations, two mechanisms are on the table: the Warsaw mechanism on damage losses, to better understand how the effects of loss and damage are generated (…). There is a lot of research. From there, at Cop25 in Madrid, the Santiago Loss and Damage Network was created, which is like an instance of technical assistance, but still without the resources to pay for the loss and damage associated with climate change. Let’s stop philosophizing!”, urges Alemán.
“I feel that going to be one of the most polarizing climate conferences” between the global north and south, anticipates the activist.
In Latin America too, climate change has been perceived for several years, as verified by environmental scientist Manuel Calvo Buendía, of Peruvian origin and co-chair of one of the working groups of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). ). From extreme phenomena such as hurricanes, alteration of trajectories in the Caribbean, increased droughts in Central America, to changes in the distribution of diseases such as malaria or dengue -which are moving to higher altitudes as the minimum temperature rises-, the list of hits gets longer.
On the eve of the international negotiations on the fight against climate change, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, pressed world leaders with a clear message: measures implemented so far to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are insufficient, he indicated. Under current policies, the world is headed for a 2.6 degree rise in global temperatures instead of the 1.5 degree rise under the target agreed at the Paris conference in 2015.
