NEW YORK, USA – The catastrophic flooding in Pakistan has sparked new calls for wealthy polluting countries who grew their economies using massive amounts of fossil fuels to compensate developing countries for the devastating effects of the climate crisis.
The currently preferred term for this concept is payment for “loss and damage”, but some activists want to go further and frame the issue as “climate reparations”, just as racial justice activists are calling for compensation for the descendants of slaves.
Beyond the stricter vocabulary, green groups are also calling for debt relief for countries in financial difficulty that devote a large part of their budget to servicing external credit, rather than directing funds towards increased resilience in the face of a rapidly changing planet.
“There is historical precedent not only for the industrial revolution, which led to increased carbon emissions and pollution, but also for the history of colonialism and the history of resource exploitation, wealth and work,” Belgium-based climate activist Meera Ghani was quoted AFP.
Ghani, a former climate negotiator for Pakistan added that the climate crisis is a manifestation of interlocking systems of oppression and a form of colonialism.
Such ideas date back decades and were first pushed by small island nations vulnerable to rising sea levels – but momentum is building once again following this summer’s disastrous floods in Pakistan, caused by unprecedented monsoon rains.
Nearly 1,600 people have been killed, tens of millions displaced and the cash-strapped government estimates losses at around $30 billion.
BEYOND MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION
Activists point out that the countries most vulnerable to the climate of the South are the least responsible – Pakistan, for example, is the source of less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, unlike the G20 countries, which represent 80%.
International climate response currently involves a two-pronged approach: “mitigation” – which means reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gases – and “adaptation”, which means taking action to change systems and improve infrastructure for changes that have already been determined.
Claims for “loss and damage” payments go beyond adaptation funding and seek compensation for increased storms that countries cannot sustain.
Currently, however, the more modest goal of adaptation finance is also weakening.
Advanced economies have agreed to channel $100 billion to less developed countries by 2020 – a promise that has not been kept – although much of the funds mobilized have taken the form of loans.
“If we assume that the Global North is largely responsible for the state of our planet today,” said Maira Hayat, assistant professor of environmental and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
“So why should countries that have contributed little to greenhouse gas emissions ask them for help – loans are the dominant form – with onerous repayment terms?”
“If the language bothers some, the next step should be to consider why that might be – are they challenging history? Or the contemporary implications of accepting certain historical pasts?
POINT SCORING?
Not everyone in the climate arena is convinced.
“It won’t go anywhere beyond a certain rhetorical score,” said Daanish Mustafa, professor of critical geography at King’s College London.
While he also blames the Global North for the current situation in the world, he says he is cautious about spreading a narrative that could excuse the actions of Pakistani leaders and the policy decisions they have made that are compounding this catastrophe.
The World Weather Attribution Group of climatologists found that climate change likely contributed to the floods.
But the devastating effects are “due to the proximity of human settlements, infrastructure (houses, buildings, bridges) and agricultural land to floodplains”, among other local factors, they said.
Pakistan’s own emissions, while low on a global scale, are growing rapidly – with the benefits accruing to a small elite, Mustafa said, and the country should embark on an alternative low-carbon development path rather than to “ape the West” and hurt themselves in the process.
The ‘loss and damage’ case recently received a boost when UN chief Antonio Guterres called for ‘meaningful action’ at the upcoming global climate summit, COP27 in Egypt in November.
But the issue is a thorny one for wealthy countries — especially the United States, historically the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — who fear paving the way for legal action, and the language of “liability and compensation of the historic Paris Agreement has prevented.
- Editor/ main report by AFP
