A climate victim’s perspective on a just loss and damage fund

Is there no one to save us? 

It is not a plea for help from a war-torn region in the Middle East, but from a villager in Shyamnagar in coastal Bangladesh. 

Jahanara Begum (not her real name) had migrated thrice in her lifetime. First, from the coastal district of Barishal after river erosion swallowed her ancestral home. Then, twice, from cyclone Aila in 2009 and cyclone Amphan in 2020 in Shyamnagar, Satkhira. 

Her life is rattled by frequent storm surges, lack of access to drinking water and paltry income from working on a shrimp farm. This is the everyday reality of most people living in low-lying villages in coastal Bangladesh. 

It is a reality that is characterised in the global media as a "natural disaster" and climate vulnerability of Bangladesh. This portrayal constructs a narrative that shows the country's vulnerability to climate change is by accident or due to its geographical location. 

It is indeed true that the Bengal Delta has a 'soaking ecology' with meandering rivers causing constant erosion and formation of land. Its coastal belts are susceptible to regular cyclones. 

However, this ecology was rich with flora and fauna that provided abundant fish and rich alluvial soil during the monsoon. It inundated the entire landscape for over eight months of a year. But this monsoon flood was once perceived as a 'blessing,' not a disaster. 

The landed territory was well protected from cyclones by the vast Sundarbans Forest. During the pre-colonial period, Bengal was known as the 'Abde Jannat,' the nation of paradise, due to its prosperous economy driven by global agricultural exports, crafts and preindustrial abundance. 

How did this land of paradise turn into a land of calamities? 

Debjani Bhattachrraya, in her book Empire and Ecology (2018), explains that the British administration completely misread this delta and had undertaken a 'development' approach that altered the original nature of this ecology through massive deforestation, construction of roads, embankments, and most crucially land reforms, particularly the enactment of permanent settlement act. 

The Permanent Settlement Act admitted the individual landholders Zaminder (predominantly high caste Hindus) and Talukder (largely elite Muslims) into the colonial state system as the absolute proprietors of landed property in this region. It negated the marginalised population's access to common lands, but allowed them to migrate and settle in places that provided abundance. 

Massive deforestation destroyed the buffer that the Sundarbans provided from frequent cyclones in October and March. The subsequent governments continued this colonial legacy of land enclosures, even after the abolishment of the Zamindari system. 

Therefore, it is not an accident that low-income countries are more vulnerable to climate change. It is a result of the extreme appropriation of nature, labour (by forced enslavement) and economy. 

Fast-forward to modern Bangladesh, the climate-displaced population is helpless and homeless, forced to choose an exploitative profession and live a life of misery from one new location to the other. 

This horrifying fate awaits most of the Global South countries in a heating planet that has already exceeded 1.1 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial level, and is well on the path toward hitting above 2.0 degrees Celsius, according to the latest published IPCC report. 

The core countries of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the rest of Europe, collectively called the Global North (GN), consume ten times more energy.  Global North committed to the Paris Agreement in 2015 a common but differentiated responsibility towards limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and much below 2 degrees Celsius by 2030. 

These would require significant reductions in carbon emissions in the Global North.  According to Hickel & Slameršak (2022), it is estimated that the Global North, on average, needs to increase the mitigation rates by 10. They are banking on green growth strategy to do this. 

The green growth strategy is technically complicated, as bioenergy with carbon and capture strategies (BECS) is risky and uncertain. and would require land up to three times the size of India, with destructive effects on biodiversity, forests, water tables, and food systems. 

The insistence on a green growth path has little light of hope in achieving the Paris Agreement; in other words, a chance towards a livable planet. So, the question arises – is there no solution to the climate crisis? 

There are potential solutions to this problem, but it is not economic growth or green growth. The most feasible alternative is to reduce the wasteful production of industrial goods and systematically reduce planned and perceived obsolescence. 

Reducing energy use will free up carbon and financial budgets for paying the reparations and reorganising the economy around people's welfare, rather than elite consumer's welfare.  

Now to the final question – how much reparations is Global South owed? 

In this year's COP28, there is much anticipation regarding the discussion on just reparation and compensation through the Loss and Damage Fund. Loss and damage in climate parlance mean inevitable damages that cannot be adapted. The development of the Loss and Damage Fund was something that had been strongly advocated by Dr. Saleemul Huq, who recently passed away this year. 

Global North has fallen far short of its financial commitments over the past decades, despite its continued overshooting of its fair share of the emission budget since 1959. According to a conservative estimate by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the emission damages from this overshooting, called 'climate debt,' have accumulated to $59 trillion from 1959 to 2018 (Clement et al.). 

This is a gross underestimation compared to the estimation of compensation based on a calculation of marginal abatement cost, which is the cost of reducing carbon emission more than the stipulated carbon budget by Global North from 2020 to 2050. 

According to Fanning and Hickel's 2023 research paper titled "Compensation for atmospheric appropriation," compensation of $192 trillion would be owed to the undershooting countries of the Global South for the appropriation of their atmospheric fair shares by 2050, with an average disbursement to those countries of $940 per capita per year.

So, will these funds fuel consumerism and more emissions in the Global South? 

The Global South countries have been bearing the brunt of climate change. There is ballooning debt in these areas due to the barrage of devastating climate impacts, and this debt and interest repayments are disrupting crucial investments for building climate resilience and providing the basic needs of the population. 

There is no bailout for the Global South countries in similar precarious economic situations. However, the IMF has instruments such as the Special Drawing Rights, which draw currencies from the reserve assets of the IMF. The Global North has drawn $250 billion during the 2009 global recession and $650 billion in 2021 to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. 

However, the Global South could not access such funding despite suffering severely due to bouts of recession and during Covid-19. We can expect that in COP28, there is consensus on the cancellation of the debt of Global South, which stands at only $3 trillion, according to the IMF Database. 

Jahanara Begum and millions of climate victims like her deserve the right to a truly dignified and better life. It is the moral prerogative in a so-called 'civilised world' to act with justice in treating the lives of the climate victims. Jahanara Begum does not deserve to suffer for the hedonism and luxury of the rich and the collective political failure of the Global North. 

Syed Muntasir Ridwan is the CEO of the Catalysing Sustainable Transformation (CaST) Network and the Co-Executive Director of Bangladesh Youth Environmental Initiate (BYEI).

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.