Journalists participating in the DFC Fellowship
With less than a month to the UN climate change conference – COP27 – watchers of the climate crisis space say the issue of climate financing will be on the front burner, especially for developing countries, when the world converges on Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt from November 6 to 18, this year for the event.
According to them, that was necessary to avert, minimise and address loss and damage associated with climate crisis.
A Chief Advisor at DanchurchAid and Co-chair of the Climate Justice Group, Mattias Soderberg, said latest studies had shown that climate crisis was moving much faster than human interventions and pushing ecosystems and communities to their limits.
He said communities in Africa were the most challenged in terms of the adverse effects of the climate crisis, in spite of the fact that the continent contributed only four per cent of global gas emissions.
This was contained in a presentation Mr Soderberg made to 24 African journalists participating in a DANIDA Fellowship Centre (DFC) climate reporting programme in Copenhagen last week.
The journalists, selected from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda, are taking part in DFC’s new learning programme dubbed: “Reporting from the African frontline of the global climate crisis.”
They are being prepared to report accurately from the African perspective at COP27.
Unmet commitments
A Senior Advocacy Advisor on Climate at CARE Denmark, a Danish non-profit organisation, John Nordbo, also said in the wake of the unmet commitment by developed countries to scale-up new and additional climate finance to reach $100 billion annually by 2020, there was lack of trust for sustainable funding of both adaptation and mitigation interventions in developing countries.
He said a critical analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that climate finance provided by developed countries for climate action in developing countries had reached $83.3 billion in 2020.
Mr Nordbo, therefore, said it was important for developed countries to ramp up efforts at mobilising resources to meet the annual goal of $100 billion.
For his part, the Chief on National Centre for Climate Research at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Adrian Lema, said strong political will was needed for climate financing and investment in green energy.
He called for prompt decisions to be made now on sustainable climate financing and green energy to avert increasing threats of the climate crisis on biodiversity, cities, agriculture and human health.
Background
As used in UN climate negotiations, ‘loss and damage’ is a general term for the consequences of climate change that go beyond what people can adapt to, or when options exist but a community does not have the resources to access or utilise them.
Since the formation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the early 1990s, vulnerable nations have been calling on developed countries to provide financial assistance that can help them address loss and damage, but those calls have been resisted.
The call for funding to address loss and damage, however, gathered steam during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 and continued at the Bonn UN climate negotiations in Germany in June 2022.
Some countries have softened their stance and are beginning to show some level of support for loss and damage financing.
They include Canada, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Scotland and the Belgian province of Wallonia.