By Kate Abnett
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union will support discussion of financial compensation for vulnerable nations bearing the brunt of climate change at next month’s U.N. climate summit, a draft document showed, a potential breakthrough for countries pushing for such talks.
The EU and United States, the world’s third and second-biggest polluters respectively, have historically resisted steps that could assign legal liability or lead to compensation for climate impacts including droughts and floods that are disproportionately hurting poor nations.
But a draft seen by Reuters of the EU’s negotiating position for the summit in Egypt showed the 27-nation bloc would support holding discussions on the topic at the Nov. 7 meeting expected to be attended by nearly 200 countries.
It remained vague, however, on what these talks would deliver, and whether the COP27 summit should launch the climate compensation fund that dozens of developing countries have called for.
“Action and support for vulnerable countries, populations and vulnerable groups needs to be further scaled up,” the document said.
Climate-vulnerable countries want COP27 to agree a fund to compensate for “loss and damage” – the destruction wrought by floods, rising seas and other climate change-fuelled impacts.
The summit in Sharm El Sheikh takes place in a year of climate-linked disasters including floods in Pakistan that killed nearly 1,700 people.
EU countries’ climate ministers meet on Monday to attempt to approve their final negotiating position.
The draft also said the bloc plans to upgrade its own climate change target “as soon as possible”, although the text was in brackets – indicating that it still needs to be thrashed out by ministers.
The EU has pledged to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions 55% by 2030, from 1990 levels.
(Reporting by Kate Abnett, editing by Marine Strauss and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
