United States officials are still engaged in talks crafting rules to implement the Paris climate agreement, even as the Trump administration moves ahead with pulling the U.S. from the deal.
U.S. State Department officials in Madrid for the two-week negotiations say that’s because they want to ensure a level playing field for U.S. businesses, many of which operate internationally.
In November, the Trump administration began the process to withdraw from the Paris deal. The U.S. exit will take effect in November, just one day after the presidential election. The U.S. delegation to this year’s talks are all career staffers. The White House chose not to send any political officials.
In Madrid, countries are scrambling to hammer out the details for a global carbon market under the Paris Agreement, as well as specifics on how developed countries should give poorer nations funding to help them deal with the effects of climate change. Agreements on those two items will almost certainly affect U.S. financing and American companies.
However, smaller, developing countries and environmental advocates say U.S. engagement in the talks obstructs progress on funding for loss and damage from climate change.
“The U.S. has shown up in some very disruptive ways in these negotiations,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists climate and energy program, told reporters on the sidelines of the talks in Madrid.
Cleetus said what developing nations are asking for is “what’s right, which is that many of them are facing catastrophic, unprecedented climate impacts already here and now, not in the future. It’s getting worse, and they just want the rich nations to acknowledge the help that they need to cope with these kinds of impacts.”
At issue is the Warsaw International Mechanism, which was created during U.N. talks in Poland in 2013 to help developing countries vulnerable to climate change deal with extreme weather and slow-onset events such as a rise in the sea level, ocean acidification, and melting glaciers.
Now, developing nations, some battered by intense storms and flooding just before their negotiators arrived in Spain, want to expand the reach of the mechanism. They’re asking for more money from the developed world, separately, that poorer countries could access after disasters and for economic losses.
“We think it is unjust when some developed countries claim to stand with us but object to even the most modest text on loss and damage,” Omar Figueroa, Belize’s climate change minister, said Thursday.
“The time to scale up finance has passed. It is time to make this mechanism deliver,” he said. “Where is the ambition on loss and damage?”
Negotiators from small island nations say their biggest blockade has been the U.S.
Cheryl Jeffers, a conservation officer from Saint Kitts and Nevis, said that’s been frustrating. “It was like, OK, so, if you are leaving the Paris Agreement, why is this relevant for you?” she told reporters on the sidelines of the talks.
But she added the U.S. is probably engaged because negotiators saw the financial implications of the loss and damage discussions.
The State Department stressed the U.S. already provides large amounts to help developing nations cope with disasters.
“The U.S. government is the largest humanitarian donor in the world,” said a State Department official, speaking with anonymity due to ongoing negotiations. The focus should be on how to use the current funding “to catalyze action” to help developing countries.
“A divisive conversation on blame and liability helps no one,” the official said.
U.S. negotiators aren’t the only ones drawing a line. Other developed countries oppose more loss and damage funding just as strongly in the negotiating rooms, even though they aren’t getting as much flak publicly.
For example, Isabella Lovin, Sweden’s environment minister, questioned whether getting “bogged down” in talks “on new financial mechanisms on all the damages we’ve done in the past” would give the world “the vision forward that we need in order to get away from fossil fuels.”
“We’re starting to get away from the Paris spirit,” which was “OK, so, we’re going to do this,” Lovin said at a press conference on Friday on the sidelines of the talks. “Now we’re back, like, ‘Who’s to blame most, and who’s going to pay?’”
Creation of a new funding stream for loss and damage won’t get agreement at these talks, said Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s environment minister who is coordinating the negotiations on the issue.
“We have to focus on scaling up” funding, he said, adding that the most important step is to get an agreement in Madrid.
For some developing countries, though, securing more funding for loss and damage is priority one, and it’s indicative of how much richer countries are really willing to ramp up their pledges to combat climate change. Figueroa of Belize said loss and damage is an “existential issue” for the Alliance of Small Island Nations, a coalition of 44 small and low-lying countries.
Humanitarian support is appreciated, Jeffers said, but is insufficient to deal with other effects of climate change, such as the economic consequences island nations experience when tourism declines due to bleached coral reefs.
It’s also too difficult to quickly access money from the Green Climate Fund and other dedicated global climate and humanitarian funds after natural disasters, she said.
“The processes to go through normal access to the [Green Climate Fund] … by the time you access the funds, another storm is back,” Jeffers told reporters.
“Some of us really will be lost and damaged, as people and as resources,” she said. “That is the reality.”
