"The celebrated “loss and damage” fund is stalled over disagreements about who should pay in, who should receive funds, and the role of the World Bank."

"At the United Nations’ annual climate change conference in Egypt last year, bleary-eyed negotiators reached a long-sought consensus on the push to pay out reparations for the damage caused by climate change. For the first time, the world’s countries formally recognized that developing countries, largely in the Global South, disproportionately suffer from the effects of climate change, and they agreed to establish a “loss and damage” fund to compensate for those harms.

While the agreement was historic, essential and controversial features of the new fund — who will pay into it, who will receive payments from it, and how it will be administered — were left to be decided by a committee made up of representatives from both developed and developing countries.

While there was hope for progress on these decisions by the time of the next UN climate conference, which goes by the name COP28 and will begin in Dubai next month, the transitional committee now appears deadlocked over a number of critical issues — in particular over whether or not to house the loss and damage fund in the World Bank. Proponents of that move, particularly the U.S. and European Union, see it as a natural fit with the international financial institution’s mandate, which since its 1944 founding, has been to support economic development in emerging economies. The World Bank only added climate change to that mandate earlier this year. Now, its stated goal is to “create a world free from poverty on a livable planet.”"

Naveena Sadasivam reports for Grist October 19, 2023. [2]