Loss and Damage: Who Pays for Climate Change in Central America?

Liane Schalatek: The reality is that we now have massive loss and damage because for the last 30 years, industrial nations have shirked their responsibility to reduce emissions.

Kevin Caners: So says Liane Schalatek of the Heinrich-Böll foundation in Washington. The climate crisis is real. The reasons for it are well known. But what is often forgotten is that the consequences of the climate crisis largely fall on those who have done the least to cause it. Losses and damages caused by climate change occur to varying degrees around the world. Central America, for example, is only responsible for a small proportion of greenhouse gas emissions, but at the same time, it is very strongly affected by loss and damage, that is, the loss of and damage to infrastructure, livelihoods, culture, and biodiversity caused by the climate crisis. These include damages caused by rising sea levels as well as by more frequent and extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes and tropical cyclones. Thats what well be talking about in todays episode. Well look at examples and experiences specifically from Central America. We'll let people from the region have their say and hear what political measures they would like to be put in place in order to better respond financially to climate related loss and damage. We'll be joined by Liane Schalatek from our office in Washington, Ingrid Hausinger from our office in El Salvador, and by Adrían Martinez Blanco from the NGO La Ruta del Clima in Costa Rica. I'm Kevin Caners, and you are listening to a Böll.Spotlight. Last June, the United Nations Climate Change Conference took place in Bonn. Around 6000 politicians, diplomats and scientists took part in the event, which acted as a preparatory meeting for the annual World Climate Summit, or COP, which this year will take place in Azerbaijan in November. All countries of the world that have signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will meet there. In other words, those states that recognize climate change as a serious problem and are committed to taking action. One topic at the conference in Bonn was a newly created fund to collect money for loss in damage caused by extreme weather events such as droughts, floods or rising sea levels that are taking place as a result of the climate crisis.

Adrián Martinez Blanco: It's just a general principle of law. International law, civil law, national law, international environmental law, human rights law.

Adrián Martinez Blanco: If you go to law school, you face this.

Adrián Martinez Blanco: If you break it, you pay it.

Kevin Caners: It's simple. Adrían Martinez Blanco works for La Ruta del Clima from the central american country of Costa Rica. He complains that even though industrialized nations are obviously mainly to blame for climate change, they are still not taking sufficient responsibility and are not even complying with existing agreements. This is fundamentally an injustice. After all, as Adrian explained to us in an interview. It is the global north that is responsible for the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Adrián Martinez Blanco: And here the developed countries are not being honest with their own populations. The reality is that industry in developed countries, including in Germany, have used a lot of carbon that did not rightfully belong to them and that is quantified in terms of energy and money. But it is the people in less developed countries who suffer the damage, especially in places like Central America and the Pacific islands.

Kevin Caners: In fact, countries such as Panama, Costa Rica and Guatemala in Central America produce a negligible share of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions. But its precisely there that the consequences of global warming are being felt the most. Thats according to Ingrid Hausinger from El Salvador.

Ingrid Hausinger: In Central America, most of the land is covered by a region called the dry corridor. Already in this corridor there is too little rainfall during the maize and bean harvests, which is the basis for feeding the population. And this is an area where 10 million people live, the vast majority of whom are indigenous people living below the poverty line. Last year already this region had an average temperature increase of 1.6 degrees and it is estimated that rainfall will decrease by up to 40% in the next five years.

Kevin Caners: Drought, lack of access to fresh water, extreme weather Honduras and Guatemala are particularly hard hit by the consequences of climate change. In some regions, up to 70% of all children are chronically malnourished, reports Hausinger.

Ingrid Hausinger: The entire coastal zone in Central America cannot be forgotten either. Coastal communities depend on fishing, which is currently being affected by the highest temperatures ever documented in the oceans. They are losing shell shrimp crops, which are often the livelihood of women in the Caribbean as well.

Kevin Caners: Adrìan Martinez Blanco is familiar with these problems. Throughout the Central American Caribbean, from the mexican peninsula of Yucatan to Colombia, there are major problems caused by coastal erosion. He describes a case from Panama.

Adrián Martinez Blanco: There is the example of Gunayala, where an indigenous people who lived on an island are being relocated, in part due to rising sea levels and coastal erosion.

Kevin Caners: Environmental experts agree that action must be taken, but recently many governments in the region have neglected environmental protection issues and climate policy. Non governmental organizations are also increasingly being restricted in their work. The central american office of the Heinrich-Böll foundation, where Ingrid Hausinger is a program director for ecology, is active in Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Ingrid Hausinger: There has been a clear deterioration, especially in Nicaragua, where almost 4000 civil society organizations have been closed since 2018. These include foundations and organizations that work directly on community resilience or climate data collection and others that take part in the major conferences and represent the needs and positions of people from the affected areas.

Kevin Caners: Some organizations that had to leave Nicaragua are continuing to do their work from exile. But Hausinger also sees setbacks in other countries, especially in El Salvador, politics is often only about increasing foreign investment in mining, the construction industry, or the agricultural sector. But this usually leads to even more environmental destruction and does not improve the quality of life of the inhabitants in the long term. Whats more is that those who stand up for the environment often find themselves in danger. As a result.

Ingrid Hausinger: Honduras continues to be the second most dangerous country in Latin America for environmental activists. This year alone, four activists from the Lenka tribe, to which the well known murdered environmental activist Berta Caceres belonged, were murdered there for defending a river, and this despite the fact that the Inter American Commission on Human Rights had taken special measures to protect them. It's not even possible to protect the lives of environmental activists in this way, and it's similar everywhere in Central America.

Kevin Caners: Even in Costa Rica, a country that was long regarded as a pioneer in climate policy. There are setbacks. That's according to both Ingrid Hausinger and Adrían Martinez Blanco. Martinez Blanco works in five countries in the region with the Böll partner organization La Ruta del Clima. The organization investigates the effectiveness of climate policy, but also carries out important grassroots work in cooperation with indigenous communities and other local actors.

Adrián Martinez Blanco: We try to generate data in order to substantiate what local communities tell us. We work with the communities, building the capabilities so that they can have a voice, not only so that they can fight for justice and make demands at a political level, but also so that they can decide for themselves how projects should be implemented in their region.

Kevin Caners: This is a particularly important point in the implementation of international climate agreements, and it usually comes down to money. Liane Schalatek is deputy director of the Heinrich Böll foundation in Washington and an expert on global climate policy and climate financing. She has a clear understanding of what should be at the forefront when it comes to distributing project funds and how the new loss and damage fund can do better.

Liane Schalatek: One possibility, for example, is to implement small scale financing via grants directly to communities, affected groups, indigenous people, and women. There is potential for us to make further progress with this.

Kevin Caners: Schalatek is well aware of the future problems that will be caused by the climate crisis.

Liane Schalatek: There are now estimates that up to $400 billion in loss and damage will be incurred by 2030.

Kevin Caners: And how is this to be financed? Adrían Martinez Blanco is adamant about what he said at the Bonn climate conference. Whoever causes the damage must pay for it, and not with loans, but rather in the form of direct compensation. And this is exactly what the newly established international fund is all about. From this pot, the particularly vulnerable countries of the global south are to receive money to compensate for or to mitigate against damages caused by climate change. The loss and damage fund provides detailed financing in the form of grants directly to affected communities in the global south. The main contributors to the fund are to be those countries who have been the biggest drivers of climate change. There has already been 700 million Euros of pledges for the fund, which was set up by the World bank. The fund is also an official part of the framework Convention on Climate Change. The fund represents a vital step in international climate cooperation. However, Liane Schalatek also sees its shortcomings.

Liane Schalatek: It is clear that from the perspective of justice, climate justice, reperations and equalization, many of the expectations placed on the fund from outside cannot be fulfilled. What can be done, however, is to try to fight, with the help from pressure from civil society, for the best possible structures with the understanding that human rights must be integrated and a focus on gender equality as well.

Kevin Caners: To deal with these issues, a new subcommittee on international climate and energy policy has been set up within the Bundestags foreign affairs committee. Schalatek considers this to be a very important development because it means that all MP's can be reached directly and provided with information which is essential, since, after all, they are the ones who will have to approve the funds. After the climate conference, Liane Schalatek and Adrían Martinez Blanco were able to address the subcommittee in Berlin about the structure of the loss and damage fund and their message was clear.

Liane Schalatek: Although Germany made 100 million in pledges last year, which was very helpful. This is of course nowhere near enough if we put this in the context that Germany is still subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of 20 billion a year.

Kevin Caners: At the COP climate conference in November in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku. The aim is now to incorporate funding for the loss and damage fund as part of a new climate financing goal. This is because the funds financing must be secured in order to be able to provide efficient aid, particularly in regions such as Central America.This was an episode of Böll.Spotlight. You can subscribe to the series and all other Böll foundation podcasts on the podcast app of your choice. For feedback and criticism, please send us an email to podcast[at]boell.de and feel free to recommend us to others. My name is Kevin Caners and the producer of this Böll.Spotlight was Viktor Coco. This podcast is a production of the Audiokollektiv.