‘A moral and a strategic responsibility’: Bowman, Omar lead call for loss and damage funding

“As you know, the United States is the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change.”

That’s how 13 progressive U.S. lawmakers began a Wednesday letter to John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, about funding to help the countries that contributed the least to the climate emergency but are disproportionately enduring its impacts.

Loss and damage funding for the Global South is a significant topic at the ongoing United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), which is set to wrap up in the Egyptian city of Sharm El-Sheikh this week.

“As we’ve seen with the historic flooding in Pakistan, the fourth consecutive drought in the Horn of Africa, the painfully slow recovery from hurricane damage in Central America, among many other examples, it is the Global South that disproportionately suffers the harms,” wrote the lawmakers, led by Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

They argued that “we have both a moral and a strategic responsibility to provide comprehensive support for countries facing climate disaster, including debt forgiveness and reparations. While we work toward those crucial goals, there are also smaller but no less important mechanisms we should be supporting.”

“One specific step we urge you to take immediately is to throw the United States’ support behind the establishment of a loss and damage finance facility under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the purpose of channeling new, grant-based public finance from developed to developing countries to help them recover from climate catastrophes,” the letter continues.

According to the U.S. lawmakers, “Ad hoc humanitarian assistance flows, insurance schemes, debt-based financing, and neglected existing funds under the UNFCCC are wholly insufficient to address the current reality in which countries are facing billions of dollars in loss and damage needs.”

The letter stresses the need for “a collaborative international effort… to make more high-quality, accessible, and fit-for-purpose financing available,” adding that it “must be supplementary to climate financing for mitigation and adaptation and should be unconditional public funding that does not deepen the debt crises faced by many vulnerable countries.”

“We have a momentous opportunity to bring other partner countries to the table and shape an equitable path forward—as you know and have proven repeatedly in your own career, when the United States leads, others follow,” they wrote to the former secretary of state, who played a key role in the 2015 Paris agreement. “Our leadership in supporting loss and damage financing would pave the way for transformative improvements in the global response on climate.”

Democratic Reps. Cori Bush (Mo.), André Carson (Ind.), Steve Cohen (Tenn.), Jesús G. “Chuy” García (Ill.), Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.), Andy Levin (Mich.), Betty McCollum (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Mark Pocan (Wis.), Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) also signed the letter.

Originally published at Commondreams.org.