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People’s landslides have suffocated villages around Manila, the Philippine capital, last week, following a typhoon that left 42 dead, 20 missing and thousands displaced by the floods.
Typhoon Vamco is the 21st tropical cyclone to hit the country this year, hitting regions recently hit by Goni, the most powerful typhoon of 2020.
Rising sea surface temperatures, caused by excessive levels of greenhouse gases warming the atmosphere, mean the Philippines faces bigger storms, more frequently.
In the aftermath of the disasters, President Rodrigo Duterte, the strong leader whose brutal “war on drugs” has led to the deaths of thousands of Filipinos, renewed calls for rich nations to be held accountable for the climate crisis that is acutely felt in the developing world.
“The problem, whether we accept it or not, is climate change,” he said on a visit to the Cagayan province on Sunday.
At the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations last week, the Philippine leader called on other countries facing extreme events to “demand climate justice from the most responsible,” saying it is the “moral responsibility” of nations. rich “fulfill its commitment to finance and invest in innovative adaptation solutions in the developing world.
“Developed countries must lead deep and drastic cuts in carbon emissions. They must act now or it will be too late. Or if I can say it, it’s too late, ”he said.
Greenpeace Philippines National Director Lea Guerrero praised Duterte’s comments, adding that private companies must also be held accountable.
“This is the strongest demand in the country for climate justice so far,” he said. “We call on President Duterte to hold not only industrialized nations, but also fossil fuel corporations, accountable for their significant role in driving the climate crisis and its unacceptable impacts on Philippine communities.”
Developed nations are responsible for 79 percent of historic carbon emissions from 1850 to 2011, according to calculations by the Center for Global Development. The European Union represents 40 percent and the United States 22 percent of that total.
President Rodrigo Duterte (right) and Senator Bong Go (left) conduct an aerial reconnaissance of areas affected by Typhoon Vamco in Metro Manila, Philippines, last week
(EPA)
A recent study by an Australian research team found that 10 percent of the world’s richest people are responsible for 25 to 43 percent of the environmental impact. In contrast, the world’s poorest 10 percent of income earners work only 3-5 percent.
And, according to Climate Action Tracker, some of the world’s largest emitters also have the worst scorecards today when it comes to the Paris Agreement goal of keeping “warming well below 2 ° C and continuing efforts to limit climate change. heating to 1.5 ° C “.
No country is doing enough with its climate targets, and only Morocco and the Gambia consider themselves “compatible with Paris” in their efforts to keep warming at 1.5 ° C. When it comes to slowing global warming well below 2 ° C, the point at which scientists believe the impact on the environment will be even more severe, only six countries are doing enough: the Philippines, Kenya, India, Ethiopia, Costa Rica and Bhutan.
The EU, Canada, Brazil and New Zealand are on the list for acting “insufficiently”; China, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Africa are “very insufficient” and at the bottom of the pile, the “critically insufficient”, are the US, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
A 2019 report by Germanwatch, a nonprofit organization, estimates that developing countries face financial damages of 290 to 580 billion dollars by 2030 from the climate crisis, even before accounting for the loss of biodiversity. and cultural sites.
The breakdown of emissions from 1850 to 2011
(Center for Global Development)
Duterte is not the only leader who highlights the unfair hand that has been given to his country in the climate crisis.
The Marshall Islands, a Pacific nation barely six feet above sea level, faces being submerged by rising water. Earlier this year, President David Kabua urged the UN General Assembly to act, noting that “small island nations and atolls like mine have no time for paper promises.”
The Marshall Islands “cannot afford for developed nations to limit themselves to lip service to the ‘loss and damage’ principle. Put bluntly, we need the funding, not just the promises, “wrote President Kabua in a Guardian op-ed.
The “loss and damage” (L&D) principle has been talked about since the early 1990s, when small island nations began to push for a compensation system to help them cope with rising sea levels.
The idea of repairs gained traction as extreme weather, floods and droughts worsened and vulnerable countries are reaching the limit of adaptation.
Yamide Dagnet, director of climate negotiations at the World Resources Institute, who spent two decades working on environmental targets for the governments of the UK, France and Belgium, called L&D “a matter of survival”, particularly in the wake of the global warfare pandemic. coronavirus.
“The most vulnerable countries are very often on the verge of despair because, in addition to the economic and health crises, they have the climate crisis,” said Ms Dagnet. The independent. “I totally understand the frustration and despair because they are the ones who contribute the least and the ones who suffer the most. We don’t see enough solidarity on the scale and pace needed from developed countries. “
The UN created the Warsaw International Mechanism in 2013 with the aim of uncovering the complexities of training and development, but so far it has focused on research on financial support.
Rich nations have shown strong resistance to L&D. At COP25, the latest UN climate talks in Madrid, USA, hampered progress by insisting on protecting itself from liability claims. The New York Times reported, while emphasizing how much it already pays in global humanitarian aid.
Harjeet Singh, a global climate change leader for the charity Actionaid and an expert on ‘loss and damage’, told Carbon Brief that “due to the harassment and blockade by the US we are going to leave this COP without support … We cannot continue asking developing countries for ambition without putting money on the table ”.
The Madrid result was that existing funding, namely from the UN Green Climate Fund, could be used for loss and damage, alongside its current purpose of helping developing countries adapt and mitigate.
But funding has slowed, in part because Trump stopped the $ 2bn (£ 1.5bn) contribution and also his administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which came into effect earlier this month. . An OECD study found that rich nations are not on track to hit the $ 100bn (£ 75bn) goal the fund had set for 2020.
But there may be a reckoning on the horizon. Dagnet believes that developing countries will push the issue of training and development at the upcoming UN climate talks in the UK, COP26, which have been postponed until November 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“They will fight for it because they know that this decade is very critical, it is a success or a failure,” he added.
Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the Bangladesh International Center for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), also said The independent that it was time to address this deeply political and “taboo” topic, during an interview this summer after supercyclone Amphan killed dozens of people and left nearly a third of the country under water.
Dr Huq, lead author of the chapter on Adaptation and Sustainable Development in the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also said that he believed the topic would be a focal point for COP26.
“Now we are seeing unavoidable loss and damage that is no longer natural but man-made,” he said. “I think they’re going to have to deal with it now. It’s inevitable, it’s happening, and it’s attributable. They can’t help but talk about it.”
