The acceptance of "loss and damage" liability was a result from COP27. But it's the USA that should pay most - not China
As Climate Home News reports, the acceptance that there should be climate reparations by richer nations to poorer ones - what is known as “loss and damage” - was a major triumph at COP27. The proposal is that a dedicated fund be established. But it’s been immediately complicated by the European request that the donor pool for such a fund be widened to include nations like China and Qatar. From CHN:
“I think everybody should be brought into the system on the basis of where they are today,” the European Commission’s Frans Timmermans argued. “China is one of the biggest economies on the planet with a lot of financial strength. Why should they not be made co-responsible for funding loss and damage?”
There are many factors here. For example, you can make the appeal to history and pin most of environmental degradation on the first and largest industrialised nations. The pushback is that current generations should not suffer under the burden of previous generations’ ignorance, both colonial and scientific
The CHN writer, Joe Lo, takes an ingenious approach to this - which is to date carbon emissions from 1990 onwards, when “scientists were in no doubt that humans were causing climate change and most of the world had freed itself from colonial rule. There’s also a fairly comprehensive dataset for this period.”
The graph at the top of this blog, on emissions per person, was generated from these parameters. As you can see, China and India are way to the bottom of the chart, with the USA nestled in at the top among the Gulf States.
What if you ignore history, and just assess national contributions on the basis of current national wealth? Again, the idea that China should share a large burden isn’t really borne out by a graph on income:
CHN continues:
If these countries did pay, how much should they pay? The ODI think tank has previously calculated each developed country's "fair share" of the collective $100 billion climate finance target for 2020.
At Climate Home's request, ODI researchers ran the numbers on potential new contributors. They found that adding the richest and highest emitting countries would not make a huge difference to the overall numbers, due to the size of their economies.
Based on their income and historical emissions, Qatar, Singapore, Israel, the UAE, Kuwait and Brunei's individual fair shares were each less than 1%. South Korea's fair share would be larger at 4%, comparable with Canada. South Korea voluntarily provides some climate finance - $200m in 2020.
While the moral case for China paying in is weaker, it could be a gamechanger if it did. Based on its total income, its fair share of any climate finance target would be 24%, the ODI found. Based on its total historical emissions, its fair share is 36%.
…Among the current set of donors, the US's "fair share" is 43% of the climate finance. But, due mostly to Republican opposition in Congress, it pays a fraction of this.
Timmermans' attention would arguably be better directed westwards. Never mind China, South Korea and Qatar: getting the USA to cough up is the biggest challenge for climate victims seeking loss and damage funds.
The site shows a final graph, which depicts that “existing climate finance donors aren't paying up…The gap in billions of dollars between countries 2020 contributions and the Overseas Development Institute's estimate of their fair share of the collective $100bn goal”:
