Talks focus on compensation for climate disaster victims
A few years ago, residents of Gitugu village in Murang’a County woke up to a devastating reality after heavy rains pounded the entire Central Kenya for weeks; their land had divided itself into pieces, and some of the pieces were either sinking or sliding away from their homesteads. “I have never seen something like this before in my entire life,” said Jane Wangui, who had been forced to abandon her home after part of her coffee plantation slid into her neighbour’s compound. “I am even scared of picking my tea leaves because I am afraid that I could be buried alive on this tea farm, and as well, some of my crop has moved to my neighbour’s compound,” she told journalists who had visited to cover the story. Such are climate induced calamities that negotiators from all over the world recently discussed for two weeks at a climate summit in Bonn, Germany, to find a way through which communities that have suffered climate-induced losses and damages are compensated. “We started the campaign for negotiators to set up a special financial facility to respond to Loss and Damage some years ago, and luckily, during the 27th round of climate change negotiations in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, a loss and damage fund was created,” said Mr Ephraim Mwepya Shitima, the chair for the African Group of Negotiators . As a result, a transitional committee on the operationalisation of the new funding arrangements and fund was established to make recommendations for consideration and adoption by the 2023 Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP 28), which will be held in Dubai towards the end of this year. During COP27, the negotiators acknowledged the urgent and immediate need for new, additional, predictable and adequate financial resources to assist developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in responding to economic and non-economic loss and damage associated with climate change. “Here in Bonn, we have been negotiating for the past two weeks with an aim of drafting a decision for COP 28. So we have been dialoguing and keenly listening to some insights of what the countries are thinking about,” said Richard Sherman, the co-chair for the Transitional Committee, which consists of 24 members from different geographical regions globally. Some of the issues the negotiators have been addressing include the funding arrangement architecture of the loss and damage facility, focusing on where the funds are to come from, how the funding facility should work, how countries will get supported, and how the funds will be delivered to the real victims who have endured losses and damage related to impacts of climate change. According to the committee’s work plan, the team will focus on all elements of its mandated recommendations at each gathering, gradually moving towards a consensus before COP28. “We are doing our part and I’m confident that we are going to deliver on this,” said Sherman, who is also a negotiator from South Africa. Africa is so far one of the most affected continents by the impacts of climate change ranging from prolonged droughts that lead to failed seasons and death of domestic animals, thereby denying locals their livelihoods. Flash floods in many cases have led to deaths and loss of property, cyclones have devastated hundreds of thousands especially in the southern parts of Africa and landslides have been witnessed across the continent. Ahead of the Bonn negotiations, a group of 51 civil society organisations through the umbrella of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) delivered a document to the transitional committee proposing that the loss and damage fund be victim-centered and with strong elements of community ownership and control that promote access to the fund by all. They also requested the committee to consider a fund that is gender sensitive and responsive as women and children are the most vulnerable and disproportionately affected by the climate crisis and related disasters. “We propose that the fund should be deliberate in inclusion of youth, indigenous and marginalised groups,” said Dr Mithika Mwenda, the executive director at PACJA. In Kenya, pastoral communities in arid and semi arid regions have continuously lost their livestock to perennial droughts that are becoming more frequent and severe. In the same vein, other communities in the country have lost lives and properties worth billions of shillings to floods, landslides and to emerging pests and diseases that are favoured by the rapidly changing climatic conditions.