South Asian nations facing extreme weather look to Cop27 – but will it deliver?

South Asian countries frequently facing devastating extreme weather events are increasingly looking to Cop27 and rich countries for more finance and thus seeking to remind them that they are not the ones to have caused the problem in the first place.

From record-breaking heatwaves and droughts to devastating floods, millions of people in south Asia have been suffering back-to-back extreme weather events on an unprecedented scale in the last few months.

Calls for reparations from wealthier countries have only grown even as climate crisis-induced disasters like intensified heatwaves, drying rivers, raging wildfires and frequent storms are now impacting regions where such phenomena were at one time unprecedented.

South Asia has always been especially vulnerable to more damage from these events compared to many other regions because of its geography, population and lack of climate-resilient infrastructure.

Millions of people in the region have been displaced due to disasters like floods damaging key infrastructures like roads, schools and hospitals. Worsening heat has also posed severe challenges to agriculture and energy in the region.

Poorer countries which have limited ability to rebuild are forced to make hard choices: whether to spend the limited amount of resources they have on development or to promote climate resilience.

People most exposed to the brunt of the climate crisis are those who are the least responsible for the problem, making the issue of climate reparations even more urgent and a matter of justice.

As Cop27 approaches, world leaders will assemble yet again to negotiate how to combat the worsening climate crisis, while calls for increased global support to help victims are set to grow.

The stakes have become higher for the UN’s 27th climate summit, especially because international climate negotiations have so far failed miserably on the crucial issue of giving financial help to the global south to prepare for the rising challenges.

The negotiations around climate finance are set to be centred around two key areas.

One is the promised $100bn climate finance pledge from rich nations that they have made every year to poor countries since the Cop15 summit in Copenhagen. But 13 years after that summit, the countries have failed to fulfil their pledge.

Experts say the sum is already minuscule of what is needed to help countries in the global south face worsening climate conditions, but there is little hope the wealthy nations will fulfil their promises ahead of Cop27.

Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly clear that the impacts of the climate crisis are beyond what people can mitigate or adapt to. This brings the second key area, a new pot of money to compensate the victims of climate-crisis-induced disasters, termed “loss and damage”, in negotiations.

But wealthier western countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and most of the EU, have repeatedly resisted to ambitious targets for climate finance and loss and damage. Last year’s Cop26 summit and the UN Bonn summit this year failed to provide any substantive progress on the issues.

But growing momentum from countries ahead of the Sharm-El-Shaikh summit may force wealthier nations to address the elephant in the room this year and bring a consensus on the issue of climate finance, even though experts say the signs are not in favour of this happening.

“The countries in the global south will have to remind richer countries that climate change is not our creation,” says Dr Anjal Prakash, research director and professor at Bharti Institute of Public Policy, who has worked on climate resilience in India and Bangladesh.

“The countries which have polluted the environment and promised to pay 100bn dollars have not been keeping their promise, and most of the time the money is coming as loans which poor countries are not able to pay,” he points out.

Countries like Pakistan, suffering from unprecedented floods, have already made it clear it is beyond their capacity to “cope with this magnitude of climate catastrophe on their own”.

Floods in this year’s monsoon season have impacted over 33 million people and have killed over 1,000 in some of Pakistan’s most impoverished regions. Similarly in Afghanistan, flooding has destroyed infrastructure like schools and hospitals, posing a long-term challenge for people already reeling under a humanitarian crisis.

In Bangladesh, a densely populated delta nation which is one of the most flood-prone areas in the world, rainfall began much earlier this year leading to even more frequent floods in its northern and central areas, impacting over seven million people.

“The variability of rainfall and severity of events is increasing and these are very clearly climate crisis-induced events,” Dr Prakash says, adding that people in several regions which were so far safe from such events were caught off-guard.

“This is a very unfortunate situation because countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan have done a lot in terms of preparing for climate adaptation,” Ulka Kelkar, director of World Resources Institute’s climate programme tells The Independent.

“Many of these countries are putting in a lot of their own money. However, beyond a point, if climate events become more extreme, or more severe, or more frequent, occurring more and more frequently, there’s a limit to how much people can cope with even if you have community preparedness.”

Parts of India’s northeastern regions have also been frequently inundated in the last couple of months, impacting over a million people. Meanwhile, large swathes of agrarian states suffer through droughts after an intense period of deadly heatwaves which have become 30 times more likely in India and Pakistan, according to data from World Weather Attribution.

Nearly two-thirds of the country has suffered through droughts in the last two years, government data shows. India’s drought-prone area has increased by 57 per cent since 1997. Over the last decade, a third of the districts of the agriculture-reliant country have experienced more than four droughts.

The country is projected to have three per cent less production of wheat this year and was forced to halt exports of the key crop earlier, facing international criticism amid a global food shortage sparked by the Ukraine invasion.

While India is the third-largest polluter, it is also a country with limited means and needs funds to pull its population out of poverty. Repeated disasters threatening its key sectors are posing a risk to the country’s economic security and forcing it to speed up climate resilience plans at the cost of ignoring developmental goals, experts say.

Explaining one such challenge, Ms Kelkar says, that the energy transition developing countries were supposed to go through over a decade has become an immediate goal with the worsening climate, making climate action and in turn climate finance a lot more urgent.

“Climate action, both on the mitigation side and adaptation side has become a very immediate priority, and both require finance whether it is transitioning away from fossil fuels energy or recovering from disasters,” she says.

“But it’s very unlikely that the target can be met before 2023.”

Experts are now demanding the country raise the issue of risk to its food security at the Cop27 summit. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi already said during last year’s Cop26 summit that wealthier nations should pay a trillion dollars in climate finance.

It is expected that India will follow through with its demand more strongly now, as it sets more ambitious climate action targets as part of its updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

Green investment in the country has been falling far short of the country’s current need for its ambitious climate targets, a recent study by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) revealed. It estimates that for India to achieve its new goals, the country requires an approximate Rs 11 trillion per year.

The combined impact of worsening seasons that the region is facing at the current warming of 1.1C is set to get worse in the coming years, even if all countries manage to deliver on their climate action goals aimed at limiting global warming to 2C in line with the landmark 2015 Paris agreement.

But if the countries manage to put a united front forward, the voice of vulnerable nations may be able to bring an effective change in the narrative this time.