Avinash Persaud is Special Advisor to the President of the Inter-American Development Bank on Climate Change. Previously he was a member of the negotiation committee to establish the Loss and Damage Fund and an architect of the original ‘Bridgetown Initiative’ on reform of the international financial architecture.   After three decades of negotiations to establish the fund for climate loss and damage, its inaugural board meeting just concluded in Abu Dhabi. The establishment of this fund is a monumental milestone. We are still some way off, but equally historic are seismic shifts underway ..read more

The board of the loss and damage fund is set to pick its host nation in July as it speeds up the process to ensure hard-hit countries can directly access money to help them recover from the unavoidable effects of climate change. As the 26-member board held its first three-day meeting in Abu Dhabi this week, discussions centered on the administrative steps needed to get the fund up and running, and giving out money as soon as possible. Selecting the host country for the board is a priority because only then will it be able to take up legal responsibility and enter into formal arrangements with ..read more

Hopes for a new global treaty to include limits on rocketing production of plastic worldwide have faded after government negotiators sidestepped the issue at UN talks in the Canadian capital of Ottawa earlier this week. At the fourth – and penultimate – round of talks, negotiators did not agree to continue formal discussions on how to cut plastic production before a final session in the Korean city of Busan set for November, making it less likely that curbs will be included in the pact. Peru’s negotiator said his country was “disappointed”, while the nonprofit Center for International Environm ..read more

Teresa Anderson is global lead on climate justice for ActionAid International. Last month, from Bangladesh to Kenya to Washington DC, over 40,000 activists in nearly 20 countries hit the streets calling on banks, governments and financial institutions to “#FixTheFinance” pushing the planet to the brink.  It’s clear that we can’t address the climate crisis unless we fix the finance flows that are failing the planet. When we know that we have hardly any time left to avoid runaway climate breakdown, it’s absurd that so much of the world’s money is still being poured into fuelling climate cha ..read more

When UN climate chief Simon Stiell addressed climate and energy ministers from the G7 group of rich nations on Monday, he issued a frank message: “It is utter nonsense to claim the G7 cannot – or should not – lead the way on bolder climate actions.” He added those countries should be “leading from the front” through much deeper emissions cuts, and bigger and better climate finance. A day later, the gathering of the most powerful industrialised democracies responded with a tepid outcome, serving up a new commitment on ending coal power generation – weakened by a loophole in the language – a reh ..read more

Heather McTeer Toney is the executive director of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign. Living in a community on the edge of an acres-wide petrochemical plant in Texas or Louisiana means that you can see, smell, and taste plastic pollution every day. All too often leaders who are charged with making decisions about plastic pollution are too far removed from the impact and easily miss the risks to human health and the environment. This past week, a thousand miles away, delegates from over 170 countries met in Ottawa, Ontario, to discuss just that: pollution from plastic. Thi ..read more

Since January, swathes of southern Africa have been suffering from a severe drought, which has destroyed crops, spread disease and caused mass hunger. But its causes have raised tough questions for the new UN fund for climate change losses. Christopher Dabu, a priest in Lusitu parish in southern Zambia, one of the affected regions, said that because of the drought, his parishioners “have nothing”- including their staple food. “Almost every day, there’s somebody who comes here to knock on this gate asking for mielie meal, [saying] ‘Father, I am dying of hunger’,” Dabu told Climate Home outside ..read more

Rukka Sombolinggi, a Torajan Indigenous woman from Sulawesi, Indonesia, is the first female Secretary General of AMAN, the world’s largest Indigenous peoples organization.  Gathered in NYC in mid-April, 87 Indigenous leaders from 35 countries met to hammer out a set of demands to address a common scourge: the green energy transition that has our peoples under siege.   Worldwide, we are experiencing land-grabs and a rising tide of criminalization and attacks for speaking out against mining and renewable energy projects that violate our rights with impacts that are being documented by ..read more

Isatis M. Cintron-Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican climate scientist and staff associate at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Liane Schalatek is associate director at the Heinrich Boell Stiftung Washington with expertise in UN climate funds and finance. Lien Vandamme is senior campaigner for the Climate & Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Imagine losing your home to catastrophic floods, your loved ones to unprecedented hurricanes, your livelihood to raging wildfires, or your ancestors’ graves to rising sea levels.   Then, to add insult to injury, i ..read more

As negotiations over a new global climate finance goal move into a higher gear, divisions are sharpening over who should be required to cough up the money needed to help vulnerable countries shift to clean energy and build resilience to climate change. For German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, all “those who can” – and “in particular the strongest polluters of today” – should step up, in addition to industrialised nations that already provide funding. “Strong economies share strong responsibilities,” she said in a nod to G20 countries on Thursday at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berl ..read more