COP29: "Our people are paying with their lives"
The mounting cost—in lives and rebuilding—of unnatural disasters.
Gary Payton writes:
In Baku, Fred Njehu held the mud-stained doll, remnant of the climate-change-amplified Tongaat tornado which devastated South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province on June 3rd. Thousands of homes damaged... 11 dead. Lamfu Yengon offered a water-damaged bedsheet from the flash floods which ravaged northern Cameroon in 2024. 8,000 destroyed homes... untold displaced families. Father Andrew Barnard and Minister Tevin Andrews recount the massive destruction of Category 4 Hurricane Beryl on the island of Carriacou in the Caribbean nation of Grenada on July 1. 98% of homes damaged... 150 mph winds.
Despite the slow pace of COP29 and the limited results to date, one highlight from the UN Climate Change Conference puts the Loss and Damage Fund into action. Funds will start to flow in 2025 to developing nations hardest hit by natural disasters caused or amplified by the climate crisis—the very disasters illustrated by Fred, Lamfu, Andrew, and Tevin. Pledges for the Fund are modest to date, $700 million plus, but final details were agreed to last week by negotiators moving the Fund forward.
Is there a lesson here? The Loss and Damage Fund was approved at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in 2022 and first pledges received at COP28 in Dubai, UAE in 2023. All of this came after years of resistance from developed nations whose CO2 emissions added to global temperature rise and climate change impacts. The COP process is imperfect. Reform is needed. But actions do happen. The open question is, can climate actions come fast enough to reduce the disasters such as those in South Africa, Cameroon, and Granada? Speed, speed is the missing component.
“Don’t use the word ‘donor.’ That implies charity. There is a climate debt that needs to be paid. We are talking about lives and livelihoods. Our people are paying with their lives.”
Jiwoh Abdulai, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Sierra Leone
UNNATURAL DISASTERS
This year, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative1 marks its 10th birthday. WWA’s new study—“10 years of rapidly disentangling drivers of extreme weather disasters”—analyzes the 10 deadliest extreme weather events over the course of past decade. In all 10, its scientists were able to identify the fingerprints of man-made climate change.
Per WWA:
Over these ten years, World Weather Attribution has developed protocols that allow the rapid evaluation of different kinds of extreme weather events across the world. The team monitors extreme events globally and uses a set of fixed criteria to decide which ones to study. For every study, the WWA scientists partner with local experts and/or national meteorological agencies. We then use weather observations, climate models and expert literature to analyse how climate change influenced the event and what elements on the ground turned a weather event into an humanitarian disaster. As soon as the findings are ready, we make them publicly available with the hope they can help inform the conversations around the causes of the event, its impacts and what needs to be done to reduce the damage and protect the population from future events.
…
Weather is complex and societies across the world are very different. With every study we learn something new that can be used to help us better prepare for the future. We also find a lot of commonalities – things that are true for many or all weather events in certain regions or even everywhere in the world. After ten years of rapid studies, we can often make the connection between climate change and an extreme weather event without having to run a detailed analysis.
We know there is no such thing as a natural disaster. It is the vulnerability and the exposure of the population that turns meteorological hazards into humanitarian disasters. Increasingly though, there are fewer and fewer meteorological hazards that can be purely described as ‘natural’. Our work, alongside the wider scientific literature, now shows that with every ton of coal, oil and gas burned, all heatwaves get hotter, and the overwhelming majority of heavy rainfall events, droughts, and tropical cyclones get more intense.
DISASTROUS COSTS
US$ 143 billion/year
The costs of extreme weather events that can be attributed to climate change over the past 20 years according to a study published by Nature Communications in 2023.
Per WWA:
“Today, the core WWA team is formed by researchers from several institutions, including the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London, The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.”
Thanks