RYAN BA­CHOO

Prime Min­is­ter of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da and chair­man of the Al­liance of Small Is­land States (AO­SIS), Gas­ton Browne, is con­fi­dent na­tions be­ing neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed by cli­mate change will soon re­ceive fund­ing from those who are ma­jor emit­ters.

Browne ex­pressed op­ti­mism as he spoke to Guardian Me­dia in a one-on-one in­ter­view at the COP27 con­fer­ence cur­rent­ly tak­ing place in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Over the week­end, Browne en­joyed a ma­jor vic­to­ry as na­tions at the Unit­ed Na­tions con­fer­ence agreed to put loss and dam­age fund­ing on its agen­da for this year’s event. It wasn’t be­fore stress­ful pre­lim­i­nary talks, which would ul­ti­mate­ly see the open­ing ple­nary ses­sion de­layed for hours, with ne­go­tia­tors un­able to agree on whether to put it on the agen­da.

It’s an agen­da item de­vel­oped coun­tries have long kept on the back burn­er but it was a ma­jor win for small is­land and de­vel­op­ing states at the start of this sum­mit.

Browne has now set his sights on fur­ther­ing the agen­da though he is wary it may not hap­pen at COP27.

He said,“I have no doubt that it will hap­pen. It is just a mat­ter of time. It took us 30 years to get it on the agen­da - it maybe a ba­by step but it’s a step. What we have to do now is be un­re­lent­ing in our quest to en­sure that the fi­nanc­ing is es­tab­lished, that it is op­er­a­tionalised by pos­si­bly 2024 be­cause it’s a very im­por­tant fund from the stand­point of cli­mate jus­tice. It is an im­por­tant fund to cre­ate eq­ui­ty in the sys­tem, and at the same time if pol­luters un­der­stand if you con­tin­ue to burn fos­sil fu­els there are con­se­quences that you have to pro­vide some type of com­pen­sa­tion.”

Browne and his col­leagues will be hop­ing that such ac­tion would serve as a “dis­in­cen­tive” to ma­jor pol­luters across the plan­et. He al­so feels it can ac­cel­er­ate the plan­et’s tran­si­tion to re­new­able sources of en­er­gy.

How­ev­er, some mem­bers with­in his own com­mu­ni­ty in the Caribbean may come un­der the radar if such ac­tion hap­pens.

Ac­cord­ing to the World Bank’s Glob­al Car­bon Project 2019, the lat­est fig­ures for car­bon diox­ide emis­sions put T&T in sec­ond place world­wide. Eyes will al­so be on the re­gion’s newest oil pro­duc­er, Guyana, and Suri­name, which has been in the busi­ness for some time now.

When asked if this will pro­duce fric­tion with­in the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty, Browne said, “We do not see the is­sue of loss and dam­age ad­dress­ing the is­sue of repa­ra­tions. For us, it’s about deal­ing with cur­rent dam­age and not to make the fund look retroac­tive to deal with past trans­gres­sions.”

Browne added that small is­land and de­vel­op­ing states can no longer foot the bill of a re­cov­ery to a dis­as­ter they did not con­tribute to.

“The is­sue of the loss and dam­age ini­tia­tive that came out of the is­sue of hav­ing some form of cli­mate jus­tice is al­so an ac­knowl­edge­ment that with­in small is­land de­vel­op­ing sates (SIDs) we do not have the means in or­der to tran­si­tion quick­ly and we need to more fund­ing mech­a­nisms so that more funds can be made avail­able to as­sist SIDs with their re­cov­ery in the af­ter­math of dis­as­ter and at the same time to pro­vide adap­ta­tion fund­ing.”

Not long af­ter this in­ter­view, Browne de­liv­ered re­marks to the me­dia out­side of the ple­nary where he had made a state­ment as ne­go­ti­a­tions on loss and dam­age fund­ing took place.

He said he told ne­go­tia­tors the of loss and dam­age need not be a con­tentious is­sue. In­stead, the prime min­is­ter said they are try­ing to get the con­sen­sus of all stake­hold­ers in­clud­ing the glob­al north and the glob­al south, de­vel­op­ing and de­vel­oped coun­tries.

This ar­ti­cle was pub­lished with the sup­port of Cli­mate Track­er.