Poorer nations call on rich countries to open their wallets at Cop30: ‘Clean up the mess you are making’
Year after year, the small, densely forested west African nation of Liberia is facing ever more extreme impacts of the climate crisis, including floods and droughts that wreak havoc for farmers and coastal erosion driven by rising sea levels.
“In May this year, I stood under a coconut tree by the sea in the city of Greenville, to mark the groundbreaking of a new coastal protection scheme,” says Emmanuel Yarkpawolo, executive director of Liberia’s Environmental Protection Agency. “When I returned to the same spot in September, just a few months later, the coconut tree was gone because of the coastal erosion we are seeing. That’s how bad things are in our country.”
The Independent met Yarkpawolo at Liberia’s modest country pavilion at the UN climate conference Cop30, where he was taking a break from his work as the country’s chief negotiator. Indeed, the Liberia pavilion – which was funded with help from the UN Development Programme – was filled with delegates from several other west African nations, with many unable to afford their own national base. It was a marked contrast to the vast, multi-roomed national hubs of many Western or oil-rich nations.
The wealth of a country makes no difference to its standing at the official Cop30 negotiations, however, where all 198 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are given equal status. “It’s why least developed countries are so committed to the UN system here, because it’s the only space that really gives them a voice,” explains Mohamed Adow, from the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa. “The US or UK can cut aid without any consultation with the recipient country – but these countries will keep coming here in good faith, hoping that the rest of the world will start to notice what is happening to them.”
In order to address so many states needing to contribute, nations form “country groups” at the UN, which negotiate as collective entities. Liberia, for example, is part of the Africa Group, the G77 Group of developing nations, and the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group.
Chairing the LDC group at Cop30 is Malawi: a southern African nation similarly stricken by impacts of the climate crisis, including droughts that are devastating its rain-fed agriculture system, and ever-more devastating Indian Ocean cyclones. GDP per capita in Liberia is only $850 (£650), while in Malawi it is even lower at $500 – so it is perhaps understandable that the chief negotiator of Malawi, and LDC group chair, Evans Njewa, has said that the priority for LDCs at Cop30 will be calling for more support for adapting to climate change agenda, along with a request for more climate aid to be available from rich countries.
“Adaptation” can include everything from mangrove forests to protect coasts, to the distribution of seeds for drought-resistent crops, to the construction of flood defences. That is different to “mitigation”, which is about reducing carbon emissions.
“Adaptation is the priority for the group of Least Developed Countries. Our 44 countries did not light this fire, but we are burning in its heat,” said Njewa at a press conference this week.
He added that “funding to enable our countries to defend ourselves against climate impacts” is also key. A pledge made at Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021 to double foreign aid for climate adaptation is due to expire this year – and Njewa said that poorer nations would like the current level of adaptation finance to undergo a further tripling to reach $120bn by 2030.
However, countries across Europe and the US have been slashing the foreign aid budgets that fund international climate programmes over the past year. At this stage of Cop30, it looks pretty hard to see how less developed nations will get what they want.
“They really are in a pickle,” says Debbie Hillier, policy lead for the international NGO Mercy Corps at Cop30. “Rich countries have a legal obligation to provide finance: it’s in the Paris Agreement [the landmark treaty signed 10 years ago at Cop21], but there’s no public finance available.
“We know how to do it: we have all the solutions, and we know it has to be locally led and designed from the bottom up. The only thing missing is the finance.”
Ahead of Cop30, Brazil and Azerbaijan – which hosted the previous UN climate conference Cop29 – released a document called the “Baku to Belem Roadmap”, which is intended to outline how countries and the private sector can increase money available to address the climate crisis, given the lack of public finance that is available.
Specifically, the roadmap sets out a new pathway to achieve the climate finance goal agreed at Cop29 – namely, to channel $1.3 trillion per year into developing countries by 2035. It outlines several key areas through which this can be done, including addressing debt and providing more grants and low-cost loans.
