Fight to make climate polluters pay for crushing poor countries at Cop31

The way Adrian Martinez Blanco describes climate finance sounds straight out of satire.

“Let’s say I have a house and you break the windows and then you come and bring me a broom so I can pick up the glass,” he begins.

“We’re co-operating – that’s nice, good for you. But your obligation was not to break the glass.

“Then to repair it, you say maybe if you had this insurance that I sell you, you will be able to repair it. Or I will loan you the money to repair it.

“That’s pretty much climate finance. Somebody’s making profit out of the harm of somebody breaking the window of my house.”

In his analogy, the breakage is fossil fuel use driving climate change and the response to the breakage is how wealthy countries responsible for the damage duck and dive paying for it.

Blanco, director of Costa Rican non-governmental organisation La Ruta del Clima (The Climate Route), is entitled to be cynical.

Once again, climate finance is struggling to get due attention or action at a global climate summit.

The Loss and Damage Fund agreed at Cop27 in 2022 has $820 million (€730 million) in pledged finance, only half of it delivered.

Meanwhile it has 176 requests for help from climate-damaged countries and communities seeking $2.8 billion in assistance.

Cop29 produced a pledge to increase general climate finance to $300 billion annually from governments and another $1 trillion from industry by 2035.

That first figure may be achievable on current trends but virtually no inroads have been made into agreeing how to extract the latter.

At Cop30 last year, it was agreed to triple adaptation finance – for protections against climate change and extreme weather – to $120 billion annually by 2035.

This is being discussed at the current summit in Antalya, Turkey, but it is not clear whether progress will be made.

The attitude of wealthy countries to this more modest but commonsense form of climate finance is extremely frustrating to aid and development agencies.

“The disaster in Nepal has sparked a lot of conversation around loss and damage but it was also a failure of adaptation finance,” says Seán McLoughlin of Christian Aid Ireland.

Nepal has been promised €20 million from the Loss and Damage Fund when the estimated cost of August’s devastating landslides and floods is €6 billion.

But timely, much cheaper, adaptation funding could have provided the monitoring and alert systems to let people know disaster was imminent.

By contrast to thousands dead and missing, no one died when the Swiss town of Blatten was buried by a similar event last year because everyone was evacuated well in advance.

“Adaptation finance means putting early-warning systems in so people know when floods are coming,” McLoughlin says.

“It means ensuring that crops are resilient to drought before drought happens. It means securing water supplies when rivers run low. It means better preparation that saves lives.”

Paul Carr is programme director for Concern in Malawi, where cyclones were almost unheard of 15 years ago but now come every few years.

“If there’s not a cyclone, there’s an extreme flood or drought, and often all three in the same year,” he says.

“This year we responded to flash floods in March that took homes, crops and livestock and sadly lives were lost.

“Then just a couple of weeks ago we had the highest temperatures on record in most of the country.

“Now there’s already delayed rains and we’re facing into drought, so even within an eight-month period you have three extreme weather events.”

Concern focuses a lot on managing the floods, and adaptation funding enables communities to build dykes and drainage systems and plant trees to boost soakage.

“It’s critical because if all you have is a small plot of land to grow maize and vegetables and a couple of banana trees and you’re being told your land is going to be flooded every year and you need to move, where do you move? With what?”

Mass migration and the conflict it can spark is neither morally or practically a good outcome for wealthy nations, yet prising money out of them remains a challenge.

The European Union, one of the more generous donors, is adamant Cop31 should focus on easing access to available funding rather than pledging more money.

Aid agencies say both are needed.

“The money is there. We saw billions of dollars in fossil fuel profits being made this year,” McLoughlin says.

“If countries come to Cop31 saying there is no available money from public sources, there are other avenues to be explored.”

Martinez Blanco points out the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion last year made clear countries have legal, not just voluntary, obligations to address the climate damage they cause.

He hopes that will help break through the excuses and red tape that restrict finance flows.

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But at Cop31 as scores of poor countries plea with their richer cousins not to break their windows, he ponders progress so far.

“We have found that some of us are not equal under the law,” he says.