[OPINION] Waiting on slow climate change talks: Is it worth the ... - Rappler

[OPINION] Waiting on slow climate change talks: Is it worth the gamble?

SUMMARY

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A decade since Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan ravaged the Philippines, taking thousands of lives and affecting millions, the country still remembers. The disaster stands to be the Philippines’ biggest climate-related casualty to date, resulting in P133-billion in loss and damage. Without immediate action and repatriations, the Philippines is a sitting duck, waiting for another Yolanda to break the country.

The term loss and damage was coined during international climate negotiations as early as 1991. In 2013, at the Warsaw Conference of Parties (COP) of the climate change convention (COP19), a Warsaw International Mechanism on loss and damage was created. That the COP happened right after Yolanda/Haiyan hit the Philippines pressured developed countries to agree to that mechanism, which unfortunately was quite weak.

It was only last year in COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt that the loss and damage negotiations significantly advanced. Hopefully, we will make more progress in COP28, which will be held in Dubai in December.

But considering how slow international negotiations and implementations are, could developing countries such as the Philippines afford to wait?

Can the walk catch up with the talk?

The COP, designed to bring countries together to land on climate agreements, as well as to facilitate their execution, has been organized every year since 1995. Even with all of the COPs’ good intentions and the breakthroughs that have occurred, again and again, results have been anticlimactic, as opposed to ambitious concords getting established. Case in point, as of November 1, 2023 – almost a year after COP27, where the agreement was made on the new loss and damage fund for vulnerable countries – no consensus on how the said fund should be financed and managed has been reached yet. Some agreements were reached by the Transitional Committee last week, but these could be opened in Dubai.

In this collective realization of nearly three decades of talk, the question that begs to be asked is, is it worth it? The trade-off on resources – energy, time, and money spent in organizing such events – could at least kickstart the loss and damage fund, among others. With COPs’ evident inefficacy, should developing countries bet on slow progress, seemingly hollow promises, and an inefficient system?

Where is the climate money now?

In COP15 held in Montreal in 2009, an agreement to jointly raise and mobilize $100 billion per year by 2020 had been reached. The financial commitment promises to address the climate adaptation and mitigation needs of developing countries. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2022), however, the finance flows in 2020 fell short of at least $17 billion of the said pledge. More recently, Reuters alarmingly found large sums of the fund going to strange places such as a coal plant, a hotel, and chocolate shops – all of which were tagged by contributing countries as climate finance.

Swinging back to loss and damage, the economic cost in developing countries is projected by Mechler et al. (2019) to go as high as $580 billion by 2030 and could escalate to $1.8 trillion by 2050. In fact, from 2000 to 2019, 54 of the world’s vulnerable developing countries lost approximately $525 billion due to the climate crisis. The glaring problem lies clear as day when these numbers are contrasted with the zero dollars currently available as loss and damage funds.

What does this mean for the Philippines?

Hailed by the 2022 World Risk Report as the most vulnerable country to disaster risk, the Philippines’ Department of Finance revealed in November 2021, that the country recorded an annual average of P48.9 billion worth of loss and damage from 2010 to 2020. In 2021 alone, Super Typhoon Odette recorded a total of P128 billion for recovery and reconstruction needs, leaving the Philippines short of nearly P110 billion from its 2021 appropriations for climate-related loss and damage. Typhoon Yolanda, on the one hand, needed nearly P105 billion in 2013, equivalent to P141 billion today.

With the forecast of climate-related disasters to worsen even more, it is only logical to estimate that the cost of loss and damage in the country would be magnified. Moreover, there are far more vulnerable communities in the country that would doubly suffer from the catastrophic impact of climate change. It will not only mean an impending economic collapse for the country but also a social crumbling.

What needs to be done?

As much as the loss and damage fund is just a band-aid solution, defining the bounds of who should pay what to whom and having it flowing into the right places right away would ease some of the developing countries’ climate burden. However, betting on this alone would be detrimental to the most vulnerable; hence, developing countries or not, a valuable contribution to a speedy process may be making key information available and accessible. For instance, the establishment of an evidenced-based scenario projection on loss and damage from each developing country, and each country’s exploration of potential fund reallocation or the creation of its own new fund resource.

The Philippines, and many others, have a choice to make – to remain as only victims of climate change, or as victors of its own ideas propelling change. Not anyone, especially the Philippines, has a decade to spare. It is now or never. – Rappler.com

Tony La Viña teaches constitutional law at the University of the Philippines and several Mindanao law schools. He is former dean of the Ateneo School of Government.

Katreena Pillejera is a licensed chemical engineer and currently serves as the Country Manager for the Philippines at the Global Reporting Initiative– the provider of the world’s most commonly used sustainability standards.