Do rich nations have a responsibility to compensate countries most affected by climate change?
For vulnerable countries, threats from climate change are no longer imminent — they're here
*Originally published on Jan. 1, 2023.
The glacial origin of Pakistan's Swat River lies in the Hindu Kush mountains. It's usually a meandering slice of ice blue, but in August — the country's wettest in 60 years — days of torrential rains, plus glacial melt spurred by global warming, transformed the quiet river into a thundering deluge.
It engulfed hotels and restaurants and homes that sat along its banks, sweeping them along in its tide. As the water surged ahead, phones were ringing in the village of Bela, a little more than 200 kilometres south of the river's starting point. The message: The water's coming. Leave if you can.
Tila Muhammad was in the mosque in Bela when he got the call from a relative farther north. He ran home and gathered the women and grandchildren, managing to get out just as the village was overrun. His sons stayed back.
Thinking back, he remembers the river had been rising for a few days, but on the day of the flood, the water seemed to come out of nowhere. It swept away half his home and destroyed his farmland.
Muhammad pointed to the silt and muck. "My crops were ruined and my trees were uprooted and carried away by the water. I planted vegetables, too, but nothing is left."
'Polluter pays' principle
For vulnerable nations like Pakistan, threats associated with climate change are no longer imminent. They're here.
For 30 years, since the first major global conference on climate change — the Earth Summit in 1992 — these countries have had a simple ask: Climate change is not our fault, but we're the ones dealing with it. Help us with the cost.
The answer from "polluter nations" — that is, those that have historically been the highest carbon emitters, and also the most wealthy — was always no. But as the ravages of climate change become clear, even in rich nations, the calculus has shifted and the question now is: Do rich countries have a moral responsibility to pay?
In 2010, Pakistan was submerged, with the country's northwest seeing the worst of it. Approximately 2,000 people died and 20 million saw some kind of loss or displacement. In 2022, the floods were even worse, with a third of the country under water and 33 million people suffering the consequences. Three months later, parts of the country, especially in the south, are still submerged.
Towns and villages like Bela were left covered in sticky mud; crops and trees were uprooted, homes destroyed. As the water receded, it left farmland covered in rocks, silt and debris.
The World Bank estimates the loss and damage from the 2022 floods at approximately $30 billion US. That's one-tenth of Pakistan's GDP. The country needs more than $16 billion for reconstruction — an impossible price tag for a low-income developing country.
"The 'polluter pays' principle is a principle of historical responsibility. And the idea is that, 'if you broke it, you fix it,'" said Laura García-Portela, a political philosopher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany who works on climate justice.
That principle has long underpinned environmental law within nations. But it's been rejected at the international level.
García-Portela says that's because it's a strong principle for responsibility and likely easier to enforce legally.
Over the years, high-polluting countries have pushed back against taking responsibility, she says. They argue they can't be culpable because the science of climate change wasn't clear until about 1990, when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its first report.
'Trying to shift the blame'
But climate science is not new. Scientists have been studying changes in the Earth's climate since the 19th century and discussing global warming since the 1970s.
And then, of course, there's the lived experience of island nations and coastal communities that have observed changes for decades.
García-Portela says it ultimately doesn't matter if polluter nations take responsibility for creating climate change — they can still do the right thing by fixing the problem.
"If [rich nations] are providing the same help they would provide if they acknowledge the responsibility, in that sense, justice is being done, because people are getting what they deserve."
But she says vulnerable nations and people still deserve to be acknowledged as victims of others' actions, not simply as people who suffer.
Julie-Anne Richards, an independent consultant with the research and advocacy group Loss and Damage Collaboration, says the resistance to accepting responsibility has led to an erosion of trust on the part of vulnerable nations.
"Rich countries have really spent 30 years finding reasons not to make any significant change and trying to shift the blame at the same time. It's impossible that they would not have undermined trust."
Richards says that while vulnerable nations did achieve a breakthrough at this year's COP27 in getting rich nations to finally agree to a loss and damage fund, there's no money yet. And most of the funds that have been available to vulnerable nations thus far are insurance-based and, ultimately, inadequate for the scale of the problem.
Rich countries have tried to shift the focus from loss and damage to building resilience, says Richards.
The former puts the burden on rich nations, while the latter puts it on vulnerable countries. The problem is turned on its head, she said, so that "it's not cyclones and typhoons at historically never-before-seen wind speeds and rising sea levels, it's that [vulnerable nations] don't have insurance."
Prioritizing human rights
Christopher Bartlett is the climate diplomacy manager for Vanuatu, a South Pacific nation of about 80 small islands and one of the most vulnerable on the planet. In order to overcome the challenges standing in the way of the help vulnerable countries need, he says the focus has to be on human rights.
Vanuatu faces everything from near-annual Category 5 cyclones to droughts to ocean acidification and coral bleaching. It's currently pushing for the International Court of Justice to offer a legal opinion on whether nations are obligated to protect human rights from the negative impacts of climate change.
"This is not a question about the obligations of some states and not others. It's that all states have obligations to protect people and protect human rights," said Bartlett. "We are well and truly out of time and we must now address this crisis for the benefit of the people living on the planet today and those that are not yet born."
Living in Bela, Pakistan, Tila Muhammad is similarly concerned about his future. He's been through a major flood before, a dozen years ago. He rebuilt his home then, but he questions whether there is any point now.
"Only God can help with crops. We will plant again, and if there is no flood, then our livelihood will return to us. Otherwise, what can we say?"
Guests in this episode:
Laura García-Portela is a political philosopher studying climate justice at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Christopher Bartlett is a climate diplomacy manager of the Government of Vanuatu based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Julie-Anne Richards is an independent consultant working on issues of loss and damage linked to climate change.
Tila Muhammad is a retired school teacher and farmer in Bela, Pakistan. The flood partially destroyed his home and swept away his crops.
Pakistan field recordings by reporter Nek Amal Utmani.
*Written and produced by Naheed Mustafa.
