: COP27 Heralds New Paradigm For Climate Action. Now The Hard Work Truly Starts #WorldNEWS Island nations are under threat from rising seas. Drought threatens wide swathes of Africa. And flooding will

COP27 Heralds New Paradigm For Climate Action. Now The Hard Work Truly Starts #WorldNEWS
Island nations are under threat from rising seas. Drought threatens wide swathes of Africa. And flooding will inundate countries across the globe.
For years, the developing countries most vulnerable to climate change warned of these threats and demanded that their wealthier counterparts help pay to address these climate-induced losses. Wealthy countries, who have caused the problem with decades of burning fossil fuels unchecked, instead insisted that they would help vulnerable countries expand clean energy and fund efforts to adapt to extreme weather. Paying to address so-called loss and damage, it seemed, represented a bridge too far.

This week, the dam finally broke. At COP27, the United Nations climate conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, that concluded early Sunday morning, delegates from countries around the world agreed to create a fund to funnel money from the Global North to the Global South to help pay for the mounting costs of climate-related damages. Nations also accelerated a program to provide technical assistance to vulnerable countries. And they called for a reworking of institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to address climate-linked loss and damage.
All told, the result represents a groundbreaking shift in how the world understands climate policy. Yes, climate policy is partly about solar panels and wind turbines, elevating streets and building sea walls. But now it is officially, for the first time at this global scale, also about paying for the inevitable losses.
This is the start of a new paradigm that truly accounts for the burdens of climate change,” said Lia Nicholson, a negotiator representing the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the conferences closing session. “Establishing this fund signals to the world that loss and damage will no longer solely be borne by those governments and people least responsible; today is a step towards climate justice. ”
This step forward brings the world into a new era of climate policy where paying to compensate for the worsening effects of climate change receives top billing in international climate discussions—and questions of how to pay for it enters the conversation in capitals of developed countries around the world. COP27 concludes a hard fought battle—but it also marks a beginning; and decisions made over the next few years will define what this new paradigm looks like.

The push for policies to address loss and damage dates back to the very beginning of U. N. discussions on climate change. In 1991, then the chair of AOSIS, the island nation of Vanuatu proposed a scheme to pay small island states when their land became unlivable as a result of sea level rise.