Climate reparations aren't charity, they're a responsibility

International climate negotiations rarely end on an upbeat note, but the latest edition staggered to an even more acrimonious ending than usual. 

“I’ll be honest — it’s grim,” said Simon Steill, head of the UN outfit that organizes the annual meetings, in a speech last Wednesday. 

The focus this year was finance. Negotiators for the groups of Least Developed Countries and the Alliance of Small Island States actually walked out as the process went into overtime, protesting the proposed deal on finance and declaring they were being excluded from the negotiations. "We cannot be expected to agree to … such contempt for our vulnerable people,” the island nations said in a joint statement.

In the end, exhausted diplomats gavelled through a statement promising $300 billion per year to help poor countries fight climate change… by 2035. The figure will be worth significantly less in 10 years, accounting for inflation. And some undefined portion would come in the form of actual funds, the rest as loans. Most climate finance to date has been offered as loans to countries already strained with debt.

The timeline, the amount and the whole process were so inadequate that India’s negotiator, Chandni Raina, described the perception of any agreement at all as an “optical illusion.” In a passionate speech after the final text was pushed through, she declared India “cannot accept it,” drawing cheers from other delegates from the Global South.

Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, described the efforts of this year’s host country Azerbaijan as “deplorable.”

Let’s just assume, for a brief speculative moment, that wealthy countries pony up. How much is $300 billion in the scheme of things? Well, Elon Musk could sell his stocks, fund the whole package for a year by himself and still keep $22 billion for his own expenses, based on Forbes’ latest estimate.

On an ongoing basis, $300 billion is about 45 days of global military spending. Or, more pointedly, the amount the world spends on crude oil in just 40 days.

More pointedly still, it’s not far off the cost of one nasty hurricane’s worth of damage. Hurricane Katrina was tallied at $200 billion in today’s dollars. Loss and damage from this year’s Hurricane Helene could cost $250 billion, according to AccuWeather’s estimate.

The $300 billion pledge is “a paltry sum” said India’s Chandni Raina, denouncing the figure as “abysmally poor.” 

By every honest accounting, the developing world is owed sums measured in the trillions for adapting to climate impacts driven mainly by economies that advanced in the fossil fuel era, to finance development without those same fossil fuels, and to compensate for loss and damage. Some advocates at this year’s climate talks wore tape over their mouths with the words “pay up.” Others had lanyards reading “pay up $5 trillion.” The final statement from COP29 only gestured towards “efforts” to “scale up” to 1.3 trillion per year.  

The “paltry sum” underscores some of the persistent misunderstandings that still dominate what we generously call “climate discourse” in wealthy countries. As well as the ongoing confusion about climate change that so many people have ingested from media and political narratives — a trillion dollar confusion.

Climate change is a pollution problem, but not like the ones we’re used to. Carbon pollution doesn’t dissipate like smog if we “lower emissions.” Put catalytic converters on cars, or scrubbers on smokestacks and the air will gradually get cleaner and more breathable. But when we burn fossil fuels the heat-trapping pollution stays in the sky. Carbon is forever, at least on human timescales. 

And that means climate impacts are a function of how much carbon pollution has been spewed in the past. And the options going forward have been narrowed by the cumulative gigatonnes already in the atmosphere. So, climate finance for developing nations isn’t a matter of generosity, it’s paying a debt.

“Climate finance for developing nations is not charity or business investments — it’s a matter of reparations. The burden of this crisis should not be shifted onto those barely responsible for causing it,” says Harjeet Singh, Global Engagement Director at the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative.

Nor can we simply start tabulating the debt starting from some recent, arbitrary date. Carbon dioxide has been piling up far longer than the 30-odd years of UN climate talks. 

“Wealthy nations, whose prosperity was built on over 150 years of fossil-fuelled industrialization, cannot simply start counting the emissions from the 1990s,” says Singh. “They bear a historical responsibility for driving climate change, and it’s time they acknowledge that debt.”

As it happens, we have a pretty clear accounting of historical cumulative emissions. And it should be sobering reading for those who insist that Canada is too small to matter in the global climate. 

Just before the latest climate summit, the team of scientists at the Global Carbon Project released a yearly update. The headline finding was that “fossil fuel CO2 emissions increased again in 2024.” And the tally of historical cumulative emissions puts Canada in the top 10. 

As you can see, countries like India and China have overtaken Canada, even on a cumulative basis. But, of course, they have wildly larger populations. And so, for the perspective of fairness and equity, we can turn to another analysis. Carbon Brief has run the numbers accounting for heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuels as well as land use and forestry. It’s a trickier calculation but Canada ranks first or second in the world (depending how you weight populations in the past and present). China and India don’t even crack the top 20 for cumulative emissions per capita.

It may not come naturally in our future-oriented culture but when it comes to understanding responsibility for climate change, it’s as important to look back as it is to look forward. Not that the forward view shows much evidence of a sharing approach to the global commons. Despite claims of “climate leadership,” Canadian oil and gas production is at an all-time high. And Canada is one of five countries in the global north responsible for a majority of planned oil and gas expansion in the coming decades. Not a strong posture from which to help orchestrate a global wind-down of fossil fuels.

It often feels like the annual UN climate talks have outlived any usefulness. But there’s a certain preciousness in that view. The countries that walked out of the negotiations this year did ultimately return. It’s one of the few fora they have to force any reckonings at all. The summits provide a kind of annual mirror held up to the world. A mirror that asks, what are you doing? And, more uncomfortably, how will you pay for what you have done?