Cop29, Climate Finance and Community Rights

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The Finance Summit and Taking Responsibility

The “Finance Summit” is called to address the root causes of climate crisis, including the impact of food production, which is estimated to be the source of a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

In Baku the promise of 100 billion dollars per year to support developing countries, those with low incomes and those most exposed to the consequences of the climate crisis (but less responsibility) in dealing with "loss and damage" will have to be renewed, with many, such as the African Union, who would like to reach 1000 billion per year.

Climate finance refers to the way in which the richest countries are called to finance the countries most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis, counteracting the effects of the changes that they themselves have contributed to causing. What is asked is an assumption of responsibility.

"In line with international law of human rights, countries that bear historical responsibility for the climate catastrophe must provide adequate reparation and compensation for losses and damages, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-recurrence. This includes debt cancellation and fundamental reforms of the international financial infrastructure”, explains FIAN International.

What is asked are compensation and the creation of real financial flows for the countries of the global South.

"The loss and damage fund must ensure the mobilization of funds and direct access to communities and must prevent the creation of new debts that would aggravate the burden of countries in the Global South vulnerable to the impact of losses and damages". (2)

Training and development

Losses and damages, it was said. The expression Loss and Damage (L&D) refers to the potential negative effects that occur in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

"L&D includes a wide variety of impacts, some of which can be quantified and expressed in monetary terms (for example, impacts on infrastructure or agricultural production) and others which are increasingly referred to as “non-economic losses”, including the loss of biodiversity, territory, cultural heritage and identity, indigenous knowledge, and which encompass the emerging issue of climate-induced human mobility” (3. IPCC Italy).

Climate crisis and false solutions

The “false solutions” that are denounced by civil society activists, environmentalists and associations that deal with the right to food and the fight against land grabbing are instead those that refer to the trade of carbon credits and interventions that become greenwashing.

"Many false climate solutions corporate-led initiatives, such as carbon markets, offsetting or new climate protection technologies like geoengineering, are dangerous distractions from real climate action and excuses for business as usual.”, says FIAN.

The alternative request is

safeguard the human rights of farmers and rural communities,
avoid the commodification of nature,
promote models based on the protection of ecosystems and biodiversity;
ensure “the recognition, restitution, redistribution and restoration of land”;
move to agroecology and enhance the knowledge, skills and rights of small food producers and rural communities.

The danger denounced is that instead, a new wave of compensations in the carbon market should be given the green light, while the action for the restoration of degraded land requires working with rural communities and strengthening the rights of small and medium farmers (therefore no to the financialization of land) against green grab, green colonialism, land grabbing for ecological purposes.

"Numerous processes of the UNFCCC are linked to food systems and agriculture. It is essential that COP29 advances with approaches based on the human rights of peoples, such as the transition to agroecology, and that greenwashing by agro-industrial corporate actors is avoided.”, says Sabine Pabst, climate and eco-destruction coordinator at FIAN International.

Climate Justice and Social Justice

Climate Justice calls social justice. It is no coincidence that this is the theme addressed by the Climate Pride, a mobilization on Saturday, November 16 in Rome.

In the platform of the mobilization we read: "COP29, if it wants to safeguard life on the planet, must guarantee adequate financial resources to the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA), the people and territories most affected by the climate crisis, to accelerate a global ecological transition truly capable of overcoming the climate crisis and containing global warming within the critical threshold of 1,5°C. As proposed by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), at least 1.000 billion dollars a year are needed (of which 400 for loss & damage and 300 for both adaptation and mitigation) of public resources alone from industrialized countries.".

Over 50 associations and movements civil society groups are calling for the cancellation of the debt of the countries most affected by the climate crisis; establishing that the “Loss and Damage” fund follows criteria of reparative proportionality based on the damage already suffered by some countries; providing mechanisms for the transfer and exchange of technologies and knowledge to the countries most affected by the climate crisis; and precisely “end the carbon credit and biodiversity credit market instead of extending it and including more and more sectors".

Sabrina Bergamini