Scientists warn that a lack of weather data in a lot of Africa means that loss and damage funds cannot be determined by a tragedy being proven to be caused by climate change.
A shortage of weather monitoring stations in places like West Africa’s Sahel region make it difficult to prove a tragedy was caused by climate change.
But that shouldn’t stop people impacted by disasters like droughts from getting money to rebuild their lives when their livestock die, scientists Friederike Otto and Joyce Kimutai told Climate Home.
At Cop27 in Egypt a week ago, countries decided to establish a fund to support climate victims and tasked a transitional committee with working out the details by Cop28 in Dubai next year.
This committee works out how to determine under what circumstances rich countries should shell out funds to developing ones for climate disasters.
Last week, scientists from World Weather Attribution said they couldn't exercise climate change’s role as in this year’s food crisis in the Central Sahel region of north-west Africa.
Erratic rainfall in 2023 triggered a severe food crisis, leaving 9.7m people in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger facing hunger.
Scientists used three observational data sets and three indices of wet season characteristics. These were how much it rained in June, when it started raining and how long it rained for. They concluded that they “could not detect significant trends or a global warming influence within the 2023 rainy season.”
But they said this may be due to uncertainties within the observational data and problems when working out the weather models for drought.
“It could either be because the data is quite poor or because we have found the incorrect indices. Or it could be since there actually is no global warming signal,” said Friederike Otto, co-lead of World Weather Attribution. “We have no method of identifying which of those three options it's.”
The data gaps are aided by deficiencies in weather stations in Africa. The data gaps are aided by deficiencies in weather stations in Africa. Mali, for example, has just 13 active weather stations, compared to 200 in Germany – a country one third the size of Mali, Bloomberg reports.
Weather stations are expensive to setup and keep but they are important to understand the current and future climate trends.
“The actual problem is the long-term purchase of capacity building,” said Otto. “That’s not just about building weather stations, but about [investing] in people.”
Climate attribution informs the controversy on loss and damage.
Joyce Kimutai, climate scientist in the Kenya Meteorological Department, said you will find serious concerns about attempts to connect loss and damage finance directly to attribution data.
“It’s a moral issue because if you don't provide compensation for losses and damages [in the situation of] events that can't directly be related to global warming or in which the signal isn't adequate, it’s likely to really disadvantage communities that are probably the most vulnerable and most exposed,” she said.
“This sort of finding is not atypical for regions of very high [climate] vulnerability,” said Otto. “That needs to be taken into account when making the mechanism by which a loss of revenue and damage fund releases finance. If you would require proof of the function of climate change every time money is released, you will basically create a fund that benefits the worldwide North [developed countries],” she said.
“The particular release of the funds cannot be directly associated with concrete [data] along with a regional attribution study,” said Otto.
“You cannot design a loss and damage fund completely separate from any scientific evidence, because only then do we may also get loss and damaged funds after an earthquake,” she acknowledged, but said other factors should also be taken into account, such as the country’s overall vulnerability to climate shocks.
The loss and damage fund is going to be paid in to by civilized world and perhaps some wealthier or more polluting developing ones. The funds will go to “vulnerable developing countries”.
The transitional committee works the meaning of “vulnerable”. It doesn't come with an official definition in the UN climate process.
It has previously been used to describe the world’s least civilized world and small island states.
But the European Commission’s climate lead Frans Timmermans said a week ago that it ought to be broader than that, including countries like Pakistan which aren’t one of the world’s very poorest.
The developing world’s lead loss and damage negotiator Vicente Yu tweeted yesterday that “all developing countries are particularly vulnerable”.
“What do we mean by vulnerability and losses and damages?” asked Kimutai. She said the African network on loss and damage is working hard to define these terms within the the coming year, in front of Cop28.
Instead of exploring the climate attribution for each specific event, regional climate trends underpinned by data and also the vulnerability of certain ecosystems, for example drylands, ought to be taken into consideration, said Kimutai.
