How Payouts for Climate Damage Fit Into COP27’s Trillion-Dollar Fight
Money talk at COP27 points to a clearer framework for the different roles money plays in addressing the climate crisis.
The plenary session at the COP27 climate conference at Sharm El-Sheikh on Monday.
Photographer: Islam Safwat/Bloomberg“Show me the money” might seem like a crass way of summarizing COP27 climate negotiations. Yet it gets to the heart of what the world must do to tackle climate change and the reason why the United Nations organizes these annual climate conferences. Bringing together every country on the planet is in no small part a method of pressuring the wealthiest attendees to pay up.
The money question gets complicated quickly, and because this is the UN it also becomes defined by jargon. Spending on “ mitigation and adaptation” is supposed to come from a $100 billion pot of climate finance contributions from industrialized nations, agreed to more than a decade ago. Trading in carbon offsets under Article 6 is meant to enable wealth transfers from developed countries to developing countries. “Loss and damage” is next frontier of compensation for disasters such as Pakistan’s floods.