Islands at Doha talks seek climate-damage insurance program

A t the United Nations climate talks in Doha this week, islands at risk because of rising sea levels due to global warming are seeking a climate-damage insurance program.

By Alex Morales

Bloomberg News

DOHA, Qatar — Islands most vulnerable to rising sea levels are pushing for a climate-damage insurance program, adding to pressure on industrial nations to boost aid committed to fight global warming past $100 billion a year.

The islands propose a "loss and damage" mechanism that would insure and compensate countries that suffer from extreme weather, erosion and drought. The request adds to tensions between more than 190 industrial and developing nations at the United Nations climate talks in Doha this week.

"All we are asking is that they help us with these issues that aren't our doing," Malia Talakai of Nauru, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS, a bloc of 43 island nations, said in an interview in Doha. "We are trying to say that if you pollute you must help us."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon joins the meeting Tuesday with six national leaders including Gabon's President Ali-Ben Bongo Ondimba and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. The conference is aiming to streamline its negotiation process this year, paving the way for adopting a treaty limiting fossil-fuel emissions by 2015 that would come into force in 2020.

Industrial nations three years ago pledged to boost aid to $100 billion a year by 2020. Those funds would cover projects including renewable energy and sea walls that would help countries adapt to and fight climate change.

The United States, the European Union and other developed countries are wary of the proposal because it may have the potential to create open-ended financial and legal liabilities, said Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi scientist based in London at the International Institute for Environment and Development.

"Developed countries hear that phrase, 'loss and damage,' and they think of an international fund for compensation and liability — taboo subjects for them," Huq said in an interview in Doha. "There's strong pushback. The U.S. has said there is no way they are going to do it."

State Department envoy Todd Stern dodged a question Monday on the matter after arriving in Doha, saying there are "some issues that are of concern there, but I don't want to weigh into that without being certain."

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said the 27-member bloc has been supportive of the concept, though has some reservations on how to proceed.

"We think that it's not really mature enough yet to say this is exactly how we do it," Hedegaard said in an interview in Doha. "We need some more work on that, but we have signaled very clearly to them that we are open to find a solution on loss and damage."

Envoys at the U.N. talks have yet to nail down details of where the $100 billion will come from and what it will be spent on. Questions remain about how to pay for the Green Climate Fund, which would channel a portion of that aid.

At a minimum, the islands want the U.N. talks to keep studying how a loss-and-damage mechanism might be established. They'd prefer delegates in Doha agree to a system, which Talakai says ultimately would have to be "much more" than the $100 billion already promised.

While AOSIS first proposed the fund 21 years ago, the request is getting fresh urgency because of evidence of increasing damage to the environment from fossil-fuel emissions. Greenhouse-gas concentrations hit a record in 2011 and are on track for another surge this year, according to a Dec. 2 commentary in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The effects of warmer temperatures have stacked up this year. Arctic sea ice shrank to its lowest extent on record, the continental U.S. is heading for its warmest year ever, and heat waves registered across Europe and in China, Russia, Morocco and Jordan. Drought struck almost two-thirds of the U.S. this year.

No insurance

"We don't have insurance against these things," Fatou Gaye, Gambia's environment minister and lead delegate for the group of least-developed countries, said in an interview.

"Richer countries can quickly adapt if hit by a climate-change disaster. For us, it takes ages. It destroys."

Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said last week that sea levels are rising faster than forecast by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Island nations from Barbados in the Caribbean to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific say rising sea levels and intensifying cyclones are dangers to their aquifers, agriculture and in some cases, the very existence of their countries.

Tuvalu and the Maldives, for example, have high points that are just a few yards above sea level.

Adao Soares Barbosa of East Timor, coordinator in Doha for the least-developing countries on the issue of loss and damage, says his country lost almost 80 percent of its rice production last year because of El Niño.

"Who will address these issues? Is it my government's responsibility?" he said in an interview. "We have a right to survive."