Agreement at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) climate talks to set up a "loss and damage" fund marks a milestone in the long fight to get help for poor communities on the frontlines of global warming, said officials and campaigners who had pressed hard for its creation.
The two-week talks in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, hampered by global geopolitical tensions, ended early on Sunday with a deal to establish a new fund to help vulnerable countries pay their rising costs of climate damage from wilder weather and rising seas.
The details on how it will operate and where it will source funds from will be worked out by a committee in the coming year.
A group of 134 African, Asian and Latin American states and small island nations, led by flood-battered Pakistan, presented a united front to push through the controversial fund.
Yeb Sano, head of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said the fund's approval "marks a new dawn for climate justice."
The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) said its members in the Pacific and the Caribbean had "exhausted all of our efforts" at COP27 to land a fund they had been pursuing for 30 years, since the issue of loss and damage was first raised at the climate talks by Vanuatu.
"Today, the international community has restored global faith in this critical process that is dedicated to ensuring no one is left behind," said Antigua and Barbuda's Health and Environment Minister Molwyn Joseph, the AOSIS chair.
"We have shown those who felt neglected that we hear you, we see you, and we are giving you the respect and care you deserve."
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the summit had "taken an important step towards justice".
While the loss and damage fund would not be enough to deal with growing climate losses, "it is a much-needed political signal to rebuild broken trust" between rich and poor nations, he said in a video statement.
The new fund will differ from other UN-backed climate funds, because it will gather money from a far wider range of sources, including development banks and innovative sources of finance, such as taxes on fossil fuels or airlines.
Traditional donor governments, including European Union (EU) members and the United States, insisted on this as a condition for supporting the fund.
They faced pushback from China and other emerging econ-omies, so the thorny issue of who will pay into the fund was put off for later.
The US and other nations have argued that China, as the world's biggest climate polluter since 2006, should have a role in contributing to the fund. Beijing has rejected the request.
Alok Sharma, the British politician who presided over the UN climate summit a year ago in Glasgow, joined a chorus of criticism of the deal by anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other governments that had wanted stronger commitments at COP27 to secure the 1.5°C limit, which he said "remains on life support".
Britain had pressed, along with other governments including the EU, for an agreement to reach peak global emissions before 2025, to decide a clear path to phase down coal use — a goal set in Glasgow — and to phase down all fossil fuels, not just coal.
All of those things are "not in this text" for COP27, Sharma said, adding its section on energy had also been weakened at the last minute.
The Sharm el-Sheikh plan includes reference to boosting "low-emission" energy, as well as renewables, in a clear nod to COP27 host country Egypt and other producers of gas, the least-polluting fossil fuel.
The language also supports the plans of many fossil-fuel-producing countries to use fledging carbon capture technology to curb emissions rather than scaling back production.
Many green groups emphasised that sluggish global action on reducing emissions will only heighten the need for funding to help people suffering from climate losses in the future.
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, global climate and energy leader for environmental group World Wide Fund for Nature who presided over COP20 in Peru, said leaders missed the chance in Egypt to speed up the rapid and deep emissions cuts essential to limit climate damage.
"The loss and damage deal agreed is a positive step, but it risks becoming a 'fund for the end of the world' if countries don't move faster to slash emissions and limit warming to below 1.5°C."
The writer is from the Reuters news agency