With the agenda item on Loss and Damage financing adopted, ECO believes action should follow words. With a lot of work ahead of us, the right principles should be adopted to guide it.
1. Grants, fool!
Loss and damage financing can’t be based on loans. Affected communities will by definition already be suffering. Making them also indebted would be cruelty.
2. We don’t need an empty shell.
Creation of a dedicated fund is the optimal option, but it cannot be created as an empty shell. We already have funds that struggle each year to see at least some funding – and at times don’t get even that (see LDCF and SCCF). We need a channel that will be able to provide support for affected people, both in relief form and to help them restore their livelihoods.
3. Give me adequate funding or give me death!
Channeled funds should be adequate to the scale of the challenge, period. Inadequate funding for loss and damage will not suffice, and eventually may lead to further losses – and keep the most vulnerable in a vicious loop of suffering and scraping to rebuild.
4. It’s not about liability but about solidarity
The funding should not be about deciding who’s guilty, but about providing help to those affected, by those with the ability to do it. Help can be provided in many ways – not only by giving money. But any action should show solidarity with those that have suffered, and help them rebuild. And in turn – those that are helping might receive similar solidarity when they are affected.
5. Human lives have no price.
If you are saying “we can give you only as much”, you are putting a price tag on the lives of those that will suffer losses and damages, no matter where they live. And this cannot ever be considered right.