Loss and damage fund a priority for country’s COP28 team

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Chief Environmental Officer Diann Black-Layne
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By Robert A Emmanuel

[email protected]

Antigua and Barbuda’s Chief Environmental Officer, Ambassador Diann Black-Layne, has indicated that ensuring the adoption of the loss and damage fund by participating nations will be top of the country’s priorities for COP28.

The annual UN climate conference begins today in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and runs until December 12.

The need for a loss and damage fund was approved by the conference last year in Egypt, after decades of lobbying by climate vulnerable nations like Antigua and Barbuda and other Caribbean and Pacific nations.

“The biggest thing is, of course, the adoption of the loss and damage fund. Antigua and Barbuda has been working on that as part of the transitional committee where I represented one of the AOSIS [Alliance of Small Island States] seats on the committee and we had five meetings in 2023,” Black-Layne said.

Loss and damage refers to the negative consequences of climate change, like rising sea levels, prolonged heatwaves, desertification, the acidification of the sea, extreme events such as bushfires, species extinction and crop failures.

The fund aims to provide financial assistance to nations that are most vulnerable and impacted by the effects of climate change, and was hailed as a historic moment.

However, there were major disagreements among countries on the transitional committee on how exactly to operationalise the fund.

It took five meetings by the committee and the fifth was hastily convened earlier this month due to major disagreements at past meetings where wealthy nations, like the US, continued to push for the World Bank, with its heavy American influence, to host the fund, while smaller nations called for an independent fund setup.

Developing states relented on their pursuit of an independent funding arrangement with a variety of conditions attached to the World Bank hosting it.

“So, the next step for the parties at COP is to adopt the text as is, so we are looking forward to that. The second thing we are looking forward to is to continue working on the loss and damage where we are lobbying to get one of the seats on the board so that we can continue doing the work,” the Chief Environmental Officer said.

Ambassador Black-Layne added that while the final text was good for small island developing states, it was a top priority to ensure that it is implemented, referencing other climate adaption funds which, on paper, were beneficial to small nations but failed to be operationalised.

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