COP28: Breakthrough deal on loss and damage fund

COLOMBO (News 1st); On the opening day of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 delegates reached a historic agreement to operationalize the loss and damage fund and funding arrangements.

“Today’s news on loss and damage gives this UN climate conference a running start. All governments and negotiators must use this momentum to deliver ambitious outcomes here in Dubai,” said UN climate chief Simon Stiell during a press conference at which the announcement was made.

Many countries pledged millions of dollars to it to help nations hit hardest by the climate crisis.

The fund has been a long-standing demand of developing nations on the frontlines of climate change coping with the cost of the devastation caused by ever-increasing extreme weather events such as drought, floods, and rising seas.

Following several years of intense negotiations at annual UN climate meetings, developed nations extended their support for the need to set up the fund last year during COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Reportedly, Sultan al-Jaber, the President of the COP28 climate conference, has said that his country, the United Arab Emirates, would commit $100 million to the fund.  

Germany has also reportedly pledged a contribution of $100 million to the fund. The United States and Japan have also announced contributions to the fund. 

The Dubai COP will mark the culmination of a process known as the ‘Global Stocktake’ – an evaluation of the progress so far on achieving key provisions of the Paris accord: namely curbing greenhouse gas emissions, building climate resilience and mobilizing financial support for vulnerable countries. 

Representatives from the 198 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are set to agree on how best to respond to the first Global Stocktake, the main accountability mechanism built into the 2015 Paris Agreement. The Global Stocktake synthesis report, published earlier this year, showed that the world remains well off track its target to limit global warming to well below 2°C and ideally 1.5°C, and called for “system transformation” on “all fronts”.

COP28 opened amid louder warnings than ever before that the world’s temperature is rising at an unmanageable rate.