Warsaw Loss and Damage Mechanism
19th Climate Change Conference held in Warsaw was closed one day after scheduled. Described as “a disappointment” by some and as “not a total failure” by others, the Conference was closed after reaching a very unambitious agreement. Most of it is just a loose statement of intentions that would be settled on the 2015 Paris Conference. But among it, stands out an interesting proposal: the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts.
According to the decision statement, the Warsaw Loss and Damage Mechanism will address loss and damage associated with the impacts of climate change in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to its adverse effects, including extreme events and slow onset events, that cannot be reduced by adaptation.
This mechanism could be seen as a response to extreme weather catastrophes, such as the typhoon Haiyan. This typhoon has killed almost 6,000 people only in the Philippines just a few days before the opening of the Conference, and probably has played an important role in the birth of the mechanism.
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Over the last 30 years, the world has lost more than 2.5 million people and almost $4 trillion to natural disasters. Economic losses are rising – from $50 billion each year in the 1980s, to just under $200 billion each year in the last decade. And about three quarters of those losses are a result of extreme weather”, said Rachel Kyte, World Bank Vice-President for Sustainable Development. “While you cannot connect any single weather event to climate change, scientists have warned that extreme weather events will increase in intensity if climate change is left unchecked.”
The aim of the Warsaw Mechanism will be to create common knowledge base, to provide technological support and, the most controversial point, to give financial support to those countries damaged by climate change weather effects. It will be constituted by an executive committee that will have its initial meeting by March 2014.
It remains to be know how this new institution will be found, how it will valuate the damages caused by the climate change and, the biggest concern for the EU members, how it will discriminate between the natural phenomena caused by the climate change and those that are entirely natural caused.
Comments Off on Warsaw Loss and Damage Mechanism /
07 Dec 2013
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juancarlosgomezmartin
IMSD /
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