At this month’s UN climate summit, rich countries agreed to generate a dedicated fund to deal with the loss and damage caused by climate disasters, after many years of blocking.
This would be a big breakthrough, however it included a catch: they want to expand the donor pool. Who pays into the fund continues to be available to debate.
For existing channels of climate finance – to chop emissions and adjust to climate impacts in developing countries – the duty to contribute falls on the listing of countries drafted in 1992. That list is dependant on membership of the OECD at that time: The european union, North America, Japan, New zealand and australia.
The world is different previously three decades. Some countries have grown to be much wealthier and much more polluting.
“I believe everybody ought to be brought in to the system on the basis of where they're today,” the ecu Commission’s Frans Timmermans argued. “China is among the biggest economies on earth with many different financial strength. Why must they 't be made co-responsible for funding loss and damage?”
There are a couple of main counterarguments: background and population.
‘Finger-pointing’
Every lump of coal and gallon of petrol burned since the industrial revolution has stoked the threat vulnerable communities face today. Early adopters of non-renewable fuels bear the largest responsibility for cumulative emissions.
And when you take China and India’s huge populations into consideration, personal consumption levels continue to be reduced than North America’s or Europe’s.
The carbon footprint of a Chinese person today is just over half what US resident’s and just slightly larger than a European’s. Indians are much less polluting, on average.
Greenpeace East Asia analyst Li Shuo told Climate Home that developed countries’ “finger-pointing” at China at Cop27 “indicates to me that countries are more willing to fight each other than climate change”.
More compelling targets for expanding the donor pool could be development success stories like Columbia, Singapore and Israel, or countries that have got rich off oil and gas like Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE.
The arguments over who should pay is going to be hashed out by 24 people on a transitional committee of the planned loss and damage fund. After three meetings in 2023, the committee will report to Cop28 in the UAE in December.
Many of the identical considerations apply to parallel negotiations on the broader climate finance target for 2025 onwards.
Who caused the weather crisis?
Modern-day taxpayers may be reluctant to accept blame for their country’s historic emissions for a couple of reasons. The first is the harm done by greenhouse gases wasn't always obvious. These guys that for a lot of countries, it was not the ancestors of today’s citizens that profited from pollution, however their colonisers.
Counting emissions only from 1990 mostly solves these problems. By then, scientists were in no doubt that humans were causing climate change and most around the globe had freed itself from colonial rule. There’s also a fairly comprehensive dataset for this period.
So an acceptable measure of responsibility for causing the climate crisis will be a country’s cumulative emissions since 1990 divided by its current population. That shifts the onus onto countries that have developed rapidly since 1990, but only slightly. By this metric, India and china continue to be nowhere near as polluting because the USA, UK or Germany.
The countries who caused the climate crisis are the ones who currently pay into climate finance – with a few exceptions.
No Arabian Gulf state is counted as developed in the UN climate process. But Qatar’s emissions per capita since 1990 are higher than the US’s or Germany’s. The emissions from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia are similarly high. Qatar and also the UAE are in the very best 20 emitters per person in Carbon Brief’s analysis of emissions since 1850.
Israel, Singapore and South Korea also avoided the “developed” classification. But they're not far behind Germany in per capita emissions since 1990. There’s a decent case on their behalf paying in a loss and damage fund.
Who are able to afford to pay?
Working out who are able to manage to pay is simpler than attributing blame – as you don't have to cope with history. But the conclusions are identical. It is the traditional developed countries who are able to afford to pay – plus a few others.
Although China's wealth has soared over the last 30 years, the typical Chinese person earns another the amount of the average European.
There are a few countries that the UN's climate system defines as “developing” though which are richer than some “developed” countries. Singapore and Qatar are some of the richest nations in the world.
Israel, the UAE and South Korea have similar wealth to Europe. Saudi Arabia is comparable to poorer European countries like Portugal and Lithuania.
What difference would it make?
If these countries did pay, how much should they pay? The ODI think tank has previously calculated each developed country's “fair share” from the collective $100 billion climate finance target for 2023.
At Climate Home's request, ODI researchers ran the numbers on potential new contributors. They discovered that adding the richest and highest emitting countries would not create a huge difference towards the overall numbers, due to the size their economies.
Based on their income and historical emissions, Qatar, Singapore, Israel, the UAE, Kuwait and Brunei's individual fair shares were each less than 1%. South Korea's great amount could be larger at 4%, comparable with Canada. Columbia voluntarily provides some climate finance – $200m in 2023.
While the moral case for China paying was weaker, maybe it's a gamechanger whether it did. Based on its total income, its great amount associated with a climate finance target would be 24%, the ODI found. According to its total historical emissions, its fair share is 36%.
In practice, climate finance flows have never been determined by a top-down assessment of what is fair.
“In the absence of a burden-sharing mechanism for the new climate finance goal, China could choose to provide climate finance without making a meaningful impact on the total resources available,” said ODI economist Laetitia Pettinotti. “This is exactly what the united states has been doing.”
Among the current group of donors, the US's “fair share” is 43% of the climate finance. But, due mostly to Republican opposition in Congress, its smart a small fraction of this.
Timmermans' attention would arguably be better directed westwards. Never mind China, Columbia and Qatar: obtaining the USA to cough up is the biggest challenge for climate victims seeking loss and damage funds.
