ANTALYA (The Thursday Times) — Countries hit hardest by climate disasters have used COP31 to complain that the money meant to help them arrives too slowly, with Nepal’s foreign minister calling the delays “not justified”.
Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage had provisionally set aside $21.6 million for Nepal in late October, after a rock-and-ice collapse in the Langtang region on August 26 sent a surge of water, mud and debris through the Nepal-China border corridor. Nepal’s disaster authority has put the toll at 1,451 dead and 5,745 missing. Khanal said Nepal needs about $5 billion for reconstruction.
He called the allocation historic but said it came almost two months after the disaster, and that further proposals and approvals could hold up the transfer for months. “We need resources immediately after disasters to rebuild, to provide relief support,” he said. “What we’ve been raising is: ‘this is not justified.’”
‘It’s already happening’
Ruel Yamuna, the COP31 Pacific envoy for climate finance access and Papua New Guinea’s special envoy for climate and environment, said Pacific island nations want to raise $500 million for the Pacific Resilience Facility to fund small, locally led projects, with a pledging event expected later this week. Preparing a funding proposal can take 12 to 24 months, he said, against a nine-to-12-month target set by the Green Climate Fund secretariat. “Climate change is not an abstract thing… It’s already happening,” he said.
Wayne King, the Cook Islands’ director of climate change, said developing countries need concrete mechanisms to deliver the $300 billion a year that rich countries agreed to mobilise by 2035, and a threefold increase in finance through the Adaptation Fund. “In our case, in the Cook Islands, we spent two years learning all the procedures,” he said.
Pakistan’s stake
Pakistan chaired the developing-country bloc that won agreement on the loss and damage fund at COP27 in 2022, after floods that caused $14.9 billion in direct damage. The Foreign Office says Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will call in Antalya for climate finance that is “predictable, adequate and accessible”. On Wednesday the Asian Development Bank approved $500 million in contingent disaster financing for Pakistan, released soon after an eligible disaster, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the summit that developed countries must deliver at least $300 billion a year by 2035.
