Flood water surrounds the New Jhoolay Lal Cotton Ginners & Oil Mill in Sanghar district, Sindh province, Pakistan. — Flood water surrounds the New Jhoolay Lal Cotton Ginners & Oil Mill in Pakistan’s hard hit Sindh province.
Photographer: Asim Hafeez/Bloomberg

A New Era of Climate Disasters Revives Calls for Climate Reparations

Developing countries like Pakistan are leading the charge for compensation from rich nations, backed by new economic research.

By Eric Roston
Graphics by Raeedah Wahid and Rachael Dottle

October 7, 2022, 12:00 AM EDT

Summertime rains supercharged by rising temperatures turned a third of Pakistan into an impromptu lake. A disaster that began in mid-June remains very much ongoing more than three months later.

Sources: NOAA, Meta and Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)

Estimates of the damage have tripled to $30 billion since the end of August.

The toll of destruction is hard to fathom: 33 million people affected, at least 2 million homes and 25,000 schools wrecked or damaged. The number of dead stands at 1,700 — and that’s before counting those lost to malaria, dysentery and typhoid, plus the looming food crisis caused by ruined cropland.

Land is still flooded in Larkana, a city of nearly a half million people located in the hard-hit southern province of Sindh. People here could end up among as many as 9 million Pakistanis at risk of falling into poverty as a result of the floods, according to a just-released report from the World Bank. Water levels have only recently started receding in the area, months after the deluge upended daily life. With homes destroyed, many people are now living on highways in tents. Food and medicine remain a challenge, as the hard work of rebuilding stretches out over the months and years ahead.

Sources: European Space Agency Copernicus Sentinel-2, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA)

Diplomats and world leaders who gather at November’s COP27, a yearly United Nations climate summit, describe Pakistan’s plight with a bit of jargon: loss and damage. As a matter of international negotiation, this concept has been a quagmire for more than a decade. But the logic underpinning loss and damage is straightforward.

Climate change worsened the flooding in Pakistan, to take a very clear example, yet the people of Pakistan created little of the atmospheric pollution that’s warming the planet. In fact, the countries propelled to wealth through two centuries of burning fossil fuels typically aren’t anywhere near as vulnerable as developing nations like Pakistan.

Note: Data as of Sept. 2

Source: UNOCHA

But someone has to pay for floods and storms, droughts and heat waves. Without political intervention, the steepest costs of today’s climate — “loss” of lives, cultures or species that can never return, and “damage” to vital infrastructure that needs to be repaired after climate-driven disasters — will continue to be borne by populations that emitted the least. That’s where a global agreement would come in, with rich nations paying to compensate their poorer counterparts for climate destruction happening now.

If, that is, there was such an agreement.

“My ask is very simple. It is that climate affected countries whose carbon footprint is less than 1% of global GHG emissions should not be having to bear the burden of other people’s contributions,” Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister for climate change, said in an interview Friday on Bloomberg TV. “Here we are afflicted with an event catastrophe that nobody has seen before in living memory and we are bearing the burden of it pretty much on our own with some help from friends.”

Many wealthy nations, including the US, remain dead set against accords that enshrine loss-and-damage mechanisms and establish formal financial obligations. The phrase has been so triggering to negotiators that the UN-backed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has long avoided using it. An IPCC report from February references “losses and damages” — and even that near-usage prompted a push by the US to strike the words.

There are exceptions: Denmark recently became the first country to pledge funding, $13 million, toward loss and damage. Meanwhile, nations that oppose such funding usually keep their position offstage at a diplomatic forum like the upcoming UN conference in Egypt. But this resistance briefly burst into view during a public appearance last month by John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate change.

“What will you be doing to step up and actually put money into loss and damage?” asked Farhana Yamin, a Pakistan-born British environmental lawyer and a key author of the 2015 Paris Agreement who was in the audience at a New York Times event, where Kerry had been speaking. The US diplomat replied that resources would be better spent preventing future emissions and adapting to climate extremes. Then he punctured the veil of normally restrained statements. “You tell me the government in the world that has trillions of dollars, because that’s what it costs,” Kerry said of loss and damage. He added that he would not be “feeling guilty” about it.

Diplomats from wealthy nations have lately seemed attuned to the inevitability that climate reparations will command significant attention at COP27. Pakistan, coincidentally, holds the rotating leadership role in what will be the largest negotiating bloc. And the conference will take place in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, making the host a loud advocate in a continent where compensation for climate impacts is needed.

But the moral case, no matter how clear, isn’t gaining ground. “Those suffering the most consequences are not responsible for creating the crisis, which puts the onus on those who were responsible,” European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans told an audience in September at the Africa Adaptation Summit. “I have to say, let’s be frank, many of our citizens in Europe will not buy this argument today because their worries are linked to their own existence in this energy crisis, in this food crisis, in this inflation crisis.”

Flood victims taking refuge in a makeshift camp after heavy monsoon rains in Jaffarabad district of Balochistan province. Photographer: Fida Hussain/AFP/Getty Images

Developing nations pushed for a formal loss-and-damage financing process last year at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, only to emerge with the promise of a loosely defined “dialogue” on the topic. If this year yields an agreement that goes beyond the toothless results of prior UN summits, it could create a financial facility to deliver technical assistance and manage payments to developing countries struggling through disasters.

But a diplomatic breakthrough at COP27 isn’t likely, and even a negotiated success wouldn’t necessarily guarantee that money becomes available. A separate UN commitment made by rich nations in 2009 to contribute $100 billion a year in climate-related financing for poor nations has never once been fulfilled. In fact, donor countries generally appear reluctant to pay for climate-finance programs given past episodes of corruption, waste and a general absence of accountability.

At this point, it’s not even certain what a formal negotiation would look like at COP27. Germany and Chile have been tapped to lead whatever talks occur on the topic, and officials from the US and EU have said they support some talks.

“If we lose the agenda fight, we might as well come home and forget about the rest of the COP, because it will be useless,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, speaking on a recent webinar organized by Carbon Brief. Without progress on the issue, he warned that the entire UN arm for climate diplomacy “becomes redundant.”

Big emitters for many years have been able to say that everyone is responsible for climate change. Carbon dioxide is the same gas everywhere, and once it’s in the atmosphere no one can say whose was whose. But new lines of scientific evidence have brought more clarity. Research in extreme event attribution allows scientists to analyze a flood, storm, or heat wave and produce statistical estimates of the intensification caused by greenhouse gas pollution. Pakistan’s rainfall was 50% more intense than would have been the case without warming temperatures, according to an analysis by World Weather Attribution, the leading scientific group behind this research.

Pakistan goes into Sharm El-Sheikh as the leader of a group known as G77+China, though it now includes more than 130 countries. Support for loss and damage is mostly common ground for this bloc, backed by a conviction that hard evidence is on their side. “There is a direct correlation of the data that we have, the science that we have, and the actions that — whether it’s developed or developing — countries are going to take on climate,” says Nabeel Munir, Pakistan’s ambassador to South Korea and leader of the G77.

Work has also advanced into assigning historic responsibility for emissions. Two Dartmouth researchers, Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin, recently published a paper that serves as a ledger connecting those who have polluted with those who have suffered economically as a result.

Among their findings over the 25-year period that ended in 2014 is that US emissions curbed economic growth in Pakistan by $33 billion (in 2010 dollars). China, likewise, produced emissions that slashed Bangladesh’s potential gross domestic product by $12.3 billion. Russian emissions caused Nigeria to suffer $38.4 billion in lost growth.

Note: Loss measured in 2010 dollars. Emitter country’s emissions per capita as of 2020

Sources: Callahan and Mankin, “National attribution of historical climate damages.” Climatic Change; World Bank

This research is explicitly aimed at informing international talks on responsibility for climate change. “There’s no veil of plausible deniability that any one country can hide behind now,” Mankin says. That also makes this emerging economic field a concern for rich, emitting nations who fear legal liability and enormous bills for compensation.

The five most prodigious emitters — the US, China, Russia, Brazil, and India — have cost the world $6 trillion in losses in 2010 dollars, or about 11% of average annual global GDP from 1990-2014. The damage attributable to the top two, China and the US, amounts to $1.8 trillion. American opposition to loss and damage is cast in stark relief by findings that the US is responsible for 16.5% of losses from climate change over the 25-year period.

“We have a system of global inequities in that the powerless often don’t have that information,” Mankin says. “We wanted to furnish that information.”

This focus on the economic aspect of climate attribution builds on 2015 research led by Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University. His team identified an optimal temperature — 55F (13C) — for economic activity as measured in GDP. Countries whose average temperatures fall below that threshold can be expected at least initially to see net benefits in a hotter world. Countries pushed above the optimum temperature, including many developing countries, will experience a further loss of potential.

Note: Researchers score countries across six vulnerability sectors, including food, health and infrastructure, and the readiness of their economic, governance and social systems to absorb shocks.

Source: Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative

Burke has been working on estimates similar to the Dartmouth findings and approved of their analysis, even if he would have preferred to publish his first. For an event like the Pakistan floods, “if climate change was at least responsible for increasing their probability, then those who caused climate change have some responsibility,” he says. “To me, that’s a straightforward ethical statement.”

How the new research lands in Egypt, or if it lands, is anybody’s guess. There’s a chance it may not go far enough for those advocating a loss-and-damage process for developing countries.

Doreen Stabinsky, a professor of environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic and an adviser to a group of developing countries, remains unsure. “Any methodology to come up with these sort of figures will have political implications and biases built in,” she says. Calculating national — rather than per capita — emissions, as the Dartmouth team has done, may have favored the US by putting too much of the responsibility on developing-country emitters like Brazil, China, and India.

Every year that passes brings more stress on Pakistan and its similarly vulnerable neighbors. South Asia’s hydrological cycle is already going haywire because of warming temperatures. Melting glaciers from the Tibetan Plateau and the mountains around it — known as the Third Pole because it has more ice than anywhere outside the Arctic and Antarctica — appear to have contributed only marginally to this year’s rain-driven flooding in Pakistan.

Source: Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative

As Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the UN General Assembly last month: “One thing is very clear: What happened in Pakistan will not stay in Pakistan.”

Next time could be different. Continued emissions will make glacier melt an increasing contributor to future flooding disasters. The developing nations around the Third Pole will be left responsible for these if there’s no mechanism for reparations.

Note: Glacier coverage from 1989-1993 derived from satellite imagery mosaic of the area, collected over the span of those four years.

Sources: Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) and United States Geological Survey (USGS)

South Asia’s glaciers began melting more intensely in the 1980s, with increasing run-off and, in some places, flooding from bursting glacial lakes. Glacier mass in the region is set to shrink by as much as half by the end of the century while the number of lake outbursts triples, according to a UN Environment Program report released in April. In northern Pakistan alone, more than 3,000 glacial lakes have formed in recent years and, based on one estimate, nearly three dozen are vulnerable to sudden bursting.

No one has ever accused the UN climate negotiations of being a scientific process. What negotiators do with either the latest doorstop UN scientific reports or the cutting-edge work of economic attribution scholarship is an open question awaiting its answer in Egypt.

If nothing else, though, the diplomats will go into talks with a far more robust answer to the basic underlying question: Who did what to whom? “It is possible to trace a scientifically valid, causal chain from an emitter to the local impacts of emissions,” Callahan says. And that factors into calculations both moral and political. “I don’t think that’s particularly subtle.”

A New Era of Climate Disasters Revives Calls for Climate Reparations

Larkana, Pakistan

More Than 2 Million Homes Hit by Floods

US Emissions Cost Pakistan $32.5 Billion in GDP Growth…

…And Across the World, US Emissions Mean Losses and Gains

Inequality Drives Climate Vulnerability

‘Third Pole’ Countries Are Highly Vulnerable to Climate Impacts

Change in Himalayan Glacier Coverage