The new catchphrase is “loss and damage,” shorthand for the fight over financing for the costs of rising seas, powerful storms and persistent drought. And the issue of whether the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change should be modified to require rich nations to bear the cost of disasters exacerbated by global warming is threatening to torpedo the Warsaw talks, which are meant to prepare a global climate agreement to be signed in 2015.
“Talk to someone who’s just lost their livelihood two times in the last five years, lost their cow” for reasons related to climate change, said Harjeet Singh, the international coordinator for the advocacy group ActionAid. “There has to be a system in place to help that poor woman.”
In the early hours of Wednesday, Mr. Singh said, the refusal of developed nations to consider seriously the creation of a new mechanism prompted a group of developing countries known as the Group of 77 and China to walk out of the talks, sending “a very strong message that they can’t go home from Warsaw without a loss-and-damage mechanism.”
Developed nations fear footing the bill for potentially unlimited future liability, and agreed only reluctantly to add loss and damage to the Warsaw agenda at the end of last year’s climate conference in Doha, Qatar.
The issue was given new momentum in recent days by the typhoon that battered the Philippines, though it could be years before scientists are able to conclude whether the giant storm’s extreme force can be traced to global warming.
“This is the issue that almost crashed the Doha talks,” said Alden Meyer, the director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And here we are going into the last days of Warsaw, and the small island states and the less-developed countries are seeing signs that they’re not going to come out of this with what was agreed last year.”
A Western diplomat who was at the talks said that it was an exaggeration to characterize the break in negotiations on Wednesday morning — which took place after 4 a.m., when delegates were exhausted from a long day — as “a walkout.” While the talks did end in discord, the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, everyone agreed to leave together with expectations that talks would resume later.
They did pick up later, and Todd D. Stern, the United States climate delegate, expressed confidence during a news conference that the conflict would not cause the discussions to fail.
“I don’t see this negotiation blowing up,” Mr. Stern said. “I think we will find a resolution.”
Mr. Stern noted that the United States and many other developed countries supported the idea of including loss and damage “broadly under the pillar of adaptation”; that is, under one of the existing categories for aid under the framework treaty.
Negotiators from developing countries are calling for a new mechanism to be established, because they lack the resources to respond to disasters that scientists predict will become more severe and more frequent as the atmosphere heats up.
Saleemul Huq, a climate policy fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, which supports projects on climate change and energy for poor countries, said the process, already troubled by disputes over emissions reductions, could break down without a deal for new financing.
“Unless a loss-and-damage mechanism is actually agreed,” he said, “we don’t see how the negotiations can continue.”
By DAVID JOLLY
November 20, 2013
