Interview
Associate Director Liane Schalatek answers some questions about the first Transitional Committee meeting in Luxor, Egypt.
Associate Director Liane Schalatek recently attended the first meeting of the Transitional Committee in Luxor, Egypt. Head of Communications Carl Roberts asked her a few questions about the committee’s work and future.
You just attended the first meeting of the Transitional Committee for funding arrangements for loss and damage, which was held in Luxor, Egypt in late March. What is the committee and what is the purpose of its work?
The Transitional Committee is a group of 24 specialized climate negotiators, 14 from developing countries and 10 from developed countries supported by some technical experts from the UN climate convention and a number of international organizations, including other UN agencies, humanitarian organizations, climate funds and development banks. They have been tasked by the international community at the last global climate summit in November 2022 (COP27) to work over the course of the year in a series of four meetings and two additional workshops. Their mandate is to figure out how to best arrange and scale up financing support for developing countries and poor and vulnerable people and communities that are already suffering tremendous losses and damages to lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure from already occurring and worsening climate impacts including from extreme weather events like typhoons, torrential rain and flooding, heat waves or prolonged droughts, which have been happening with increasing frequency and intensity. One only has to remember the massive flooding in Pakistan last year that cost more than 1,700 people their lives, affected more than 20 million people, and caused an estimated damage of at least US$ 15 billion, even without considering enormous reconstruction costs. In the past, very little money has been made available to address such loss and damage, despite the fact that there is a mandate to support developing countries in climate action under the international climate regime and on loss and damage specifically under the Paris Agreement. This is a matter of grave climate injustice as the people in developing countries who have contributed the least to climate change are those already affected worst by losses and damages caused by unavoidable climate change impacts.
By December, when the next international climate summit convenes in Dubai (COP28), the committee is supposed to submit its recommendations for the global climate community to consider and approve. Most prominently, their proposal should detail what a new Loss and Damage Fund (LDF) to be designed as part of funding arrangements to support developing countries should look like, including its scale, how it is governed, what it should fund, who should receive the financial support, and where the money for the new fund should come from.
Read the full interview here.
Originally This Interview was published by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union Website.
