Facing the worst flooding disaster in its history, Pakistan has begun demanding reparations, or compensation, from the rich countries that are mainly responsible for causing climate change. In repeated public statements, Pakistan’s Minister for Climate Change, Sherry Rehman, has been saying that while her country makes negligible contribution to global warming, it has been among the most vulnerable to climate change. The current floods have already claimed over 1,300 lives, and caused economic damage worth billions of dollars. Rich nations, Rehman has argued, owe reparations to countries like Pakistan for the consequences of climate change.
On the face of it, Pakistan’s demand for reparations appears to be a long shot, but the principles being invoked are fairly well-established in environmental jurisprudence. In fact, Pakistan is not alone in making this demand. Almost the entire developing world, particularly the small island states, has for years been insisting on setting up an international mechanism for financial compensation for loss and damage caused by climate disasters. The issue has come up repeatedly at international climate change negotiations, and on other platforms.
Historical emissions argument
At its heart, the demand for compensation for loss and damage from climate disasters is an extension of the universally acknowledged “Polluter Pays” principle that makes the polluter liable for paying not just for the cost of remedial action, but also for compensating the victims of environmental damage caused by their actions.
In the climate change framework, the burden of responsibility falls on those rich countries that have contributed most of the greenhouse gas emissions since 1850, generally considered to be the beginning of the industrial age.
The United States and the European Union, including the UK, account for over 50% of all emissions during this time. If Russia, Canada, Japan, and Australia too are included, the combined contribution goes past 65%, or almost two-thirds of all emissions.
Historical responsibility is important because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and it is the cumulative accumulation of this carbon dioxide that causes global warming. A country like India, currently the third largest emitter, accounts for only 3% of historical emissions. China, which is the world’s biggest emitter for over 15 years now, has contributed about 11% to total emissions since 1850.
While the impact of climate change is global, it is much more severe on the poorer nations because of their geographical locations and weaker capacity to cope. This is what is giving rise to demands for loss and damage compensation. Countries that have had negligible contributions to historical emissions and have severe limitations of resources are the ones that face the most devastating impacts of climate change.
Admission of responsibility
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1994 international agreement that lays down the broad principles of the global effort to fight climate change, explicitly acknowledges this differentiated responsibility of nations. It makes it very clear that rich countries must provide both the finance and the technology to the developing nations to help them tackle climate change. It is this mandate that later evolved into the $100 billion amount that the rich countries agreed to provide every year to the developing world.
While this promise is yet to be met, this $100 billion per year amount is not meant for loss and damage. Climate disasters were not a regular occurrence in 1994, and as such the UNFCCC does not make a mention of loss and damage. This particular demand emerged much later, and faced stiff resistance from the developed nations.
It was after much struggle that the developing countries and NGOs managed to establish a separate channel on loss and damages at international climate change negotiations. The Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) for Loss and Damages, set up in 2013, was the first formal acknowledgment of the need to compensate developing countries struck by climate disasters.
However, the progress on this front has been painfully slow. The discussions under WIM so far have focused mainly on enhancing knowledge and strengthening dialogue. No funding mechanism, or even a promise to provide funds, has come about. At last year’s climate conference in Glasgow, a three-year task force was set up to discuss a funding arrangement.
The pushback
It is not hard to understand why the developed countries are dead against compensation claims. They are struggling to put together even the $100 billion per year flow that they had reluctantly agreed to provide.
Further, loss and damage claims can easily spiral into billions of dollars, or even more. According to a recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Efforts (UNOCHA), prepared for the UN General Assembly, annual funding requests related to climate-linked disasters averaged $15.5 billion in the three-year period between 2019 and 2021. The economic loss from cyclone Amphan in India and Bangladesh in 2020 has been assessed at $15 billion.
The report said that the United States alone is estimated to have “inflicted more than $1.9 trillion in damages to other countries” due to its emissions. Then there are non-economic losses as well, including loss of lives, displacement and migration, health impacts, and damage to cultural heritage. The report cited the results of another study to say that the unavoidable annual economic losses from climate change were projected to reach somewhere between $290 billion to $580 billion by the year 2030.
Estimating the quantum of loss
Of course, not every loss and damage can be put up for compensation claims. There are practical difficulties in estimating how much a country has actually suffered due to the actions of others. To begin with, it has to be established that the disaster was caused by climate change. Good progress has been made in attribution science over the last few years, which now enables scientists to say with a fair degree of certainty how much role climate change has had to play in a particular extreme weather event. But it is still far from being an exact science.
Then there is this other step about assessing how much of the losses are due to the event itself, and what could be attributed to misgovernance. For example, the kind of flooding currently being witnessed in Bengaluru could, to a very large extent, be attributed to the lack of efficient urban planning even though a heavy downpour could be the result of climate change.
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A lot of background work is going on to create the framework in which it would be possible to quantify the compensation due to an affected country.
What Pakistan has done, through its demands for reparations, is to call attention to this often neglected aspect, as the world prepares for this year’s climate conference, scheduled to be held in Sharm-el Shaikh in Egypt in November. Pakistan has already received widespread support from global climate NGOs that are likely to press for allotting more time for this subject at the Egypt conference.