• “Loss and damage” refers to the irreversible impacts linked to climate change, that is to say those which are already real or which cannot be avoided.

  • Pushed by the countries of the South, the small island States in the lead, "loss and damage" is a subject that has been rising for several COPs and which resulted in a major breakthrough last Saturday in Sharm el-Sheikh, with the commitment of the countries to create a fund dedicated to this issue.

  • The countries of the North have long been hostile to this, for fear, among other things, of de facto recognizing the existence of a climate debt.

    What enabled COP27 to cross this line?

    And what construction site opens now?

    A brief overview.

Not one more step on the exit from fossil fuels.

No progress either on commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

COP27, which ended on Saturday in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, could have turned into a total fiasco.

But there is all the same a chapter which makes it possible to speak of a balance sheet in halftone: that of “losses and damages”.

In the final decision of this UN climate summit, the 200 or so countries represented recognize the urgent and immediate need for new financial resources for this issue, in particular by dedicating a new specific fund to it.

At the COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the countries of the North had promised to raise 100 billion dollars a year, starting in 2020, to help those of the South with the mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Or the imperatives of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for the future consequences of climate change.

A promise not kept to date, by the way.

Not to be confused with mitigation and adaptation

“Loss and damage” is something else again.

“This refers to the irreversible impacts linked to climate change, those which are already real and which cannot be avoided”, executive Fanny Petitbon, climate expert at Care France.

"This new mechanism could have been used to finance reconstruction in Pakistan after the historic floods of recent months", illustrates Elise Naccarato, climate campaign manager at Oxfam France.

We can also imagine it for hurricanes, heat waves, forest fires and other extreme weather events attributable to climate change and affecting vulnerable countries.

Fanny Petitbon adds slowly occurring phenomena, such as sea level rise, which already has these consequences.

In other words, the losses and damages cover a wide spectrum of irreversible impacts, and the most successful studies estimate the sum to be collected per year, by 2030, at 580 million dollars, to deal with them, just for the developing countries.

In Sharm el-Sheikh, we did not go to this degree of precision... Hard to imagine in this framework of negotiations so constrained that are the COPs, slip both Elise Naccarato and Christian de Perthuis, founder of the Climate Economics Chair at Paris-Dauphine University.

A 30-year-old deadlock

However, Fanny Petitbon does not minimize a “major advance”.

“For more than thirty years, small island states have been asking for funding dedicated to loss and damage and urging developed countries to take their responsibilities,” she recalls.

Even the great communion at COP21, in 2015, did not allow us to go that far.

In the Paris agreement, the least developed countries had indeed obtained that an article – the 8 – be dedicated to loss and damage when the countries of the North had refused until then to separate the subject from that of adaptation.

But the United States had obtained in the process that this article 8 does not give rise to a "compensation clause".

A way to protect themselves from possible obligations to allocate funds for these losses and damages and to recognize a climate debt of the rich countries.

Seven years later, the context has radically changed.

"The already real impacts of global warming are increasingly visible, and therefore increasingly difficult to ignore in international negotiations", points out Christian de Perthuis.

At the same time, trust between the countries of the North and those of the South has continued to wane in recent years, against a backdrop of the unfulfilled promise of 100 billion, but also of the monopolization of vaccines against Covid-19 by rich countries.

“Little by little, from a subject bogged down in very technical discussions, losses and damages have become a political issue, continues Fanny Petitbon.

In Sharm el-Sheikh, the G77 countries + China, a coalition of 134 developing countries, managed to put the subject back on the carpet.

Not without harm.

Witness the 40 hours of negotiations required to add loss and damage to the agenda of this COP.

And if in the second week, the front of the countries of the North ended up cracking, "the small states went so far as to issue an ultimatum, assuring that they would block any final decision agreement if it did not contain the creation of this fund", says Fanny Petitbon.

Which countries fund?

Who benefits from it?

But this commitment to create a loss and damage fund is only a first step.

It remains to look into the details, and they are significant.

This is the purpose, in part, of the “transition committee” made up of 24 States – 14 developing and 10 developed – that COP27 also set up.

Its mission will be to make recommendations, discussed at COP28, to operationalize this fund.

Christian de Perthuis and Elise Naccarato see at least two fundamental questions to be resolved by then: Which countries finance this fund, and which benefit from it?

On the first, "the challenge is to know if we limit to the countries considered as developed in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Unccc), i.e. the 26 present in the OECD in 1980, details the professor of economy.

Or if we associate with it, as the EU pleads, others who fully contribute to global warming.

".

A request for enlargement which essentially targets China. 

On the second question, “the final decision of COP27 sees quite broadly by mentioning developing countries as potential beneficiaries and not just the least developed,” continues Elise Naccarato.

This makes it possible to include countries that have contributed very little to the climate crisis but are the first to suffer its consequences”.

But here again, countries in the North are ticking.

The urgency to overhaul climate finance?

Another challenge will be to fix the sums to be collected.

This time, the question is not so much for this transition committee “It will most likely be within the framework of the new collective objective on climate finance, the negotiations of which must be completed by 2025”, estimates Fanny Petitbon.

This is the continuation of the "100 billion", an estimate of needs which dates from thirteen years ago and which should be updated, taking into account the acceleration of climate change, but also this need to include “loss and damage”.

The “climate” expert from Care France then refers to the Stern report [named after its main author, economist Nicholas Stern], published during COP27.

It rates more than 2.

Colossal.

However, Fanny Petitbon and Elise Naccarato invite us not to get stuck on this amount, but on what it implies: the need to find new sources of financing for the climate.

Taxes on the extraction of fossil fuels?

On the superprofits of the companies in the sector?

On emissions from the aviation sector?

So many tracks that come up regularly on the table.

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