Loss & damage will take Centre stage in COP 27, says Bhupender Yadav

Loss and damage caused by climate extremes would take the Centre stage on the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 27) scheduled from November 6 to 18  in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, Bhupender Yadav, union cabinet minister of Environment, Forest and Climate said on Tuesday. 

“Loss and damage initiative will take the centre stage in the upcoming COP. The countries which do not have any role in climate change are the worst affected ones,” the minister said during  a Clean and Green Globe conference organised by FICCI LEADS

Last year, the Indian government joined hands with twenty four like-minded developing countries (LMDCs) to push for climate disaster funding from developed nations on the “polluter pays” principle, but nothing fruitful happened. This is when 95 per cent of the Indian coastal districts are considered as extreme level hotspots regarding climate risks and in the last five years, the country has seen back-to-back  natural disasters.

“Loss and damage” is a general term used in the UN climate negotiations to refer to “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 them”. It is generally understood to encompass losses and damages resulting from slow-onset changes — desertification, land degradation, sea-level rise, glacial retreat, etc., -— and extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods, droughts, and heatwaves. 

Since the formation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the early 1990s, developing and underdeveloped nations have been calling on developed countries to provide financial assistance that can help them address loss and damage. But their proposals have been rebuffed.

At the Conference of Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, the momentum for providing funding to address loss and damage gained steam. Scotland and Belgium set aside $2.6 million and $1.1 million, respectively, to compensate but the majority of the developing nations have not adhered to the commitments.