TACLOBAN CITY-Filipino climate campaigners joined a worldwide call for climate finance that will enable developing countries, such as the Philippines, to address climate change to coincide with the 50th Group of 7 (G7) Summit on June 13, 2024.
“The unprecedented heat in most of Southeast and South Asia, and the floods in southern Brazil, remind us that developing countries are hit the hardest despite contributing the least to the climate crisis,” said Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD).
On June 11, APMDD and allied climate activist groups marched to the U.S. Embassy in Manila to tell G7 leaders that “rich, industrialized countries of the Global North are most responsible for causing this crisis with their historical and current greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Therefore, they are obligated to pay the costs of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and ensuring a just transition in the Global South. If they do not deliver the amount we need, we cannot limit average global temperatures to below 1.5C,” Nacpil said in a statement to the media.
“The climate crisis is escalating, and people in the Global South are suffering from its increasingly devastating impacts,” Nacpil added.
Citing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), APMDD and fellow climate campaigners said that developed countries agreed to provide climate finance to cover the costs of developing countries’ climate programs and projects.
The target amount of climate finance that must be raised for the Global South, will be a big agenda item at the climate negotiations at COP29 in December, according to the climate activists.
They added that COP29 “is expected to set the new collective quantified goal for climate finance, which will replace the previous goal of $100 billion a year pledged by Global North governments.”
“This $100 billion pledge, made in 2009 and reiterated in 2015, has already been exposed and criticized as severely inadequate, yet the world’s richest nations have continuously failed to meet it. The G7 has collectively delivered only $30.9 billion through the UNFCCC’s climate funds,” APMDD said.
To raise funds for climate finance, the groups suggested that G7 leaders can tax elites and corporations, who, according to them, “are the world’s top polluters and profiteers.”
In its 2021 first Needs Determination Report, UNFCCC estimated that the cost of mitigation and adaptation would be $5.9 to $11.4 trillion until 2030.
“However, this amount represents the cost of only 26% of the needs of 24 countries, out of the 164 developing country parties to the UNFCCC, meaning the real cost of mitigation and adaptation is much higher. This figure also excludes economic loss and damage, which is estimated to cost at least $400 billion per year by 2030,” APMDD said.
(RONALD O.REYES)
