The report highlights how rich countries have repeatedly stalled efforts to provide dedicated finance to developing countries bearing the costs of a climate crisis they did little to cause.
RH Desk
October 24
An average of 189 million people per year have been affected by extreme weather-related events in developing countries since 1991, says a new report.
The report ‘The Cost of Delay’ by the Loss and Damage Collaboration, a group of more than 100 researchers, activists, and policymakers from across the world has highlighted how rich countries have repeatedly stalled efforts to provide dedicated finance to developing countries bearing the costs of a climate crisis they did little to cause.
The report said that “in the first half of 2022 six fossil fuel companies combined made enough money to cover the cost of major extreme weather and climate-related events in developing countries and still have nearly $70 billion profit remaining.”
It also said that 55 of the most climate-vulnerable countries have suffered climate-induced economic losses “totaling over half a trillion dollars during the first two decades of this century as fossil fuel profits rocket leaving people in some of the poorest places on earth to foot the bill.”
The report also found that the fossil fuel industry made enough super-profit between 2000 and 2019 to cover the costs of climate-induced economic losses in 55 of the most climate-vulnerable countries almost sixty times over.
It is also estimated that since 1991, developing countries experienced 79 % of recorded deaths and 97 % of the total recorded number of people affected by the impacts of weather extremes.
The analysis also shows that the number of extreme weather and climate-related events that developing countries experience has more than doubled over that period with over 676,000 people killed.
Lyndsay Walsh, Oxfam’s Climate policy adviser and co-author of the report said: “It is an injustice that polluters who are disproportionately responsible for the escalating greenhouse gas emissions continue to reap these enormous profits while climate-vulnerable countries are left to foot the bill for the climate impacts destroying people’s lives, homes, and jobs.
“This is not a future reality, it is happening now, as we are seeing with the devastating floods in Pakistan and unprecedented drought in East Africa.
“As one of the few people who has attended every single COP over the last three decades, I have personally witnessed the resistance from the developed countries to every attempt by the vulnerable developing countries to discuss loss and damage from human-induced climate change. If it doesn’t get on the agenda from COP27 onwards the UNFCCC will have failed in its responsibilities,” said Professor Saleemul Huq, Director of the International
Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh
With current global policies projected to result in about 2.7°C warming above pre-industrial levels, and huge gaps between the amount of finance required by developing countries to adapt and what is being provided, the urgent need for finance to address Loss and Damage is clear.
