At the recent Cop27 climate talks in Egypt, government negotiators debated late in to the night over what signals to provide on which countries should receive funds to address losing and damage brought on by global warming.
The G77+China bloc of developing countries wanted all developing countries to become eligible for the funds. The European Union – which caused lots of global warming and thus is going to be likely to pay in to the fund – wanted the cash to simply visit “particularly vulnerable” developing countries.
In the end, the 2 sides chosen agreeing to generate a funding arrangement and money “for assisting developing countries, particularly those that are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of climate change”.
That creates a battle over how you can define which developing countries are “particularly vulnerable”. The field will be fought within the next 12 months through the 24 people in the brand new transitional committee.
What does vulnerability mean?
Vulnerability to global warming has three aspects. Is the country vulnerable to floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts, sea level rise and all sorts of other nasty things climate change can throw to you? Exist people and precious things in the regions of the nation in danger? And does your country have the money, experience and government capability to cope with these disasters?
Some countries, like Australia and also the USA, are geographically susceptible to fires, heatwaves and droughts but have the money to deal with them. Others, like Mongolia or Libya, don’t face any particularly severe climate threats but would struggle to deal with any that they did.
Measuring vulnerability by country is tough and inherently flawed. Climate change is gone through by people not nations.
The Notre Dame Institute judges Switzerland to be the least climate vulnerable country and Niger to be probably the most vulnerable. But an elderly homeless person in Switzerland will find it harder to deal with a heatwave compared to president of Niger does.
As the Adelphi think-tank’s Janani Vivekenanda told Climate Home: “If you want to be sure that the most vulnerable are becoming the support that they need, this is often at the sub-national level. You have pockets of fragility, of communities which are particularly vulnerable since they're politically excluded. They are marginalised communities, they aren't area of the state architectures.”
What will the EU want?
Of the wealthy nations, it had been the EU that first ended its decades-long resistance to dedicated loss and damage finance. It was then the bloc most active in placing conditions on that support.
Its negotiators have been tight-lipped over who they would like to exclude. The European Commission’s climate lead Frans Timmermans said at Cop27 that China should pay into a loss and damage fund, which means that it wouldn’t be a beneficiary.
The European Commission’s chief negotiator Jacob Werksman said in a Politico event recently that the UN climate convention’s classification of developed and developing countries, based on who was part of the OECD in 1992, has run out of date.
He added: “We have to get to the particularly vulnerable. It’s still for the negotiators to work on what that means. For us, It means setting a priority that actually does focus on the countries which are recognised as vulnerable from both a physical and economic point of view but additionally takes into account vulnerable communities in countries that might have capacities in general that may describe them as middle-income anyway.”
In UN climate talks, particularly vulnerable has been used to mean small island developing states (Sids) and also the world’s poorest countries – referred to as least civilized world (LDCs). This would exclude countries like Pakistan, which suffered catastrophic floods this year.
Timmermans clarified at Cop27 that “particularly vulnerable” would include Pakistan, in his view.
What do developing countries want?
In Un climate talks, 134 developing countries are represented through the G77+China bloc. After Cop27 ended, their chief negotiator on loss and damage Vicente Yu tweeted that “all developing countries are particularly vulnerable”.
He told Climate Home that the characteristics to be particularly vulnerable, as defined in the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 2023 Paris Agreement, are applicable in a single way or any other to all developing countries.
The UNFCCC says that “low-lying and other small island countries, countries with low-lying coastal, arid and semi-arid areas or areas prone to floods, drought and desertification, and developing countries with fragile mountainous ecosystems are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of climate change”.
It adds to the list “countries whose economies are highly dependent on income generated from the production, processing and export, and/or on consumption of fossil fuels and associated energy-intensive products” and “landlocked and transit countries”.
Indeed, this definition is broad enough to include every nation on the planet.
What perform the poorest countries want?
Senegal’s Madeleine Diouf represents the smaller, poorer number of countries known as the LDCs. Diouf pointed towards the narrower interpretation offered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Global warming (IPCC). She said: “There is a definition for loss and damage, where the existing capacity of the nation is essential.”
In a 2023 report, the IPCC defined vulnerability as “the propensity or predisposition to become adversely affected” and said hello “features a number of concepts and elements, including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and insufficient ability to cope and adapt”.
They added: “Global hotspots of high human vulnerability are found specifically in west, central and east Africa, south Asia, central and south America, small island developing states and the Arctic.”
Those hotspots cover all of the developing world except southern Africa, north Africa, the Middle East, southeast and east Asia. These regions are generally wealthier.
In its loss and damage fund proposal, published before Cop27, the little island negotiating group (Aosis) uses similar language to that pushed through the EU. It stresess the need to protect “the vulnerable particularly the particularly vulnerable for example Sids and LDCs”.
How would you measure vulnerability?
In March 2023, the IPCC tried to map vulnerability. It had been contentious, giving a flavour of the find it hard to come.
Its classification took it's origin from the INFORM Risk Index and the World Risk Index, which use indicators for example use of basic infrastructure and health care, nutrition, extreme poverty levels, literacy rates, inequality, governance and perception of corruption.
It didn't take into account exposure to sea level rise, storms, heat stress or floods – now or in future projections. That reflected deficiencies in consensus on how to compare the severity of various climate hazards.
On this basis, a lot of sub-Saharan Africa was judged to possess “very high” vulnerability. China was “medium” while much of the Arabian Gulf, much of South usa and areas of southern Africa were “low”.
Some government representatives expressed concerns the national averaging couldn't account for differences within countries. Others considered criteria on governance and corruption as policy-prescriptive and biased towards wealthy nations. They did not approve it for inclusion within the report’s “summary for policymakers”.
The US-based Notre Dame Institute combines geographic factors with countries’ capability to adapt for a more precise ranking. To determine a country’s food system vulnerability, it forecasts how much cereal yields will change, how dependent a rustic is on food imports and it is agricultural capacity.
It placed China at 68 from 182 countries with adequate data, in which a low number means less vulnerable.
Ultimately, vulnerability is not static. Who gets money will be determined as much by political relations and resources available as objective indicators of need. For rich countries, that could get down to: not China.
