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The case for climate reparations is now irrefutable

By:   []

Date: 2022-03 

“A brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

That’s the sobering assessment made by scientists on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which earlier this week published its latest report, on the impacts of the climate crisis.

In it, the IPPC argues that roughly 3.5 billion people – 45% of the world’s population – currently live in areas of “high vulnerability” to climate change, meaning they will be heavily impacted by floods, droughts or extreme weather in the decades to come.

Yet even more striking than the sheer scale of these impacts is their inequality and unfairness. The vast majority of those 3.5 billion people are in “west-, central- and east Africa, south Asia, Central and South America, small island developing states and the Arctic”. These regions – which have some of the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the world – are now suffering the effects of a crisis that has been driven and exacerbated by the looting of their lands for wealth and natural resources.

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Not only are these countries and communities faced with displacement, food shortages, water insecurity and more, unless there is concerted global action, the report also asserts that many losses are already happening now, and are irreversible.

What’s finance got to do with it?

This situation is a result of the failure (or perhaps more accurately, refusal) of rich countries to support the Global South against the climate crisis in UN negotiations. Not only have these “Annex 1” countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and most of the EU, repeatedly resisted ambitious, binding targets on emissions reductions, they have also repeatedly broken promises on financial assistance.

Last November, at COP26 in Glasgow, the Global South had three key demands on finance: greatly increased climate finance grants; far more funding for climate adaptation; and a new pot of money to compensate for the loss and damage already being suffered by frontline communities.
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