Journalists participating in the DFC Fellowship
With less than a month to go until the UN climate change conference – COP27 – observers in the climate crisis space say the issue of climate finance will be front and center, especially for developing countries. development, when the world will converge on Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt from November 6 to 18, this year for the event.
This, they said, was necessary to avoid, minimize and address loss and damage associated with the climate crisis.
A DanchurchAid chief adviser and co-chair of the Climate Justice Group, Mattias Soderberg, said the latest studies had shown that the climate crisis was moving much faster than human interventions and pushing ecosystems and communities to their limits.
He said communities in Africa faced the most adverse effects of the climate crisis, despite the continent contributing only 4% of global gas emissions.
This was in a presentation Mr. Soderberg gave to 24 African journalists attending a DANIDA Fellowship Center (DFC) climate reporting program in Copenhagen last week.
Journalists, selected from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda, are taking part in DFC’s new learning program titled: “Reporting on the Frontline of the global climate crisis”.
They are being prepared to accurately reflect the African perspective at COP27.
Commitments not kept
A senior climate advocacy adviser at CARE Denmark, a Danish non-profit organization, John Nordbo, also said that following the unfulfilled commitment by developed countries to increase new and additional climate finance to reach 100 billion dollars per year by 2020, there was a lack of confidence in the sustainable financing of adaptation and mitigation interventions in developing countries.
He said critical analysis by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that climate finance provided by developed countries for climate action in developing countries had reached $83.3 billion. in 2020.
Nordbo therefore said it was important for developed countries to step up their efforts to mobilize resources to meet the annual target of $100 billion.
For his part, the director of the National Center for Climate Research at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Adrian Lema, said that strong political will was needed for climate finance and investment in green energy.
He called for swift decisions to be made now on sustainable climate finance and green energy to avert the growing threats of the climate crisis to biodiversity, cities, agriculture and human health.
Background
As used in the UN climate negotiations, the term “loss and damage” is a general term for the consequences of climate change that go beyond what people can adapt to, or when options exist but a community does not have the resources to access or use them.
Since the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the early 1990s, vulnerable nations have called on developed countries to provide financial assistance that can help them cope with loss and damage, but these calls were resisted.
The call for funding to address loss and damage, however, gained momentum at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 and continued at the UN climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany in June 2022.
Some countries have softened their stance and are beginning to show some level of support for loss and damage financing.
They include Canada, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Scotland and the Belgian province of Wallonia.
