COP27: Reasons for Anger, Reasons for Hope
The most vulnerable people on the planet are suffering day in, day out from the devastating impacts of climate crises. I will no longer use the neutral phrase “change” to describe what is a crisis. Debilitating droughts, record famine, and extreme flooding, once rare, breaking news, have become a staple part of our 24-hour news cycle.
In Pakistan, my people are suffering. The worst flooding the country has ever experienced has displaced 33 million people and killed 1,700. The damage will last long after the waters recede: two million homes and 10% of the country’s health care infrastructure have been destroyed or damaged. This devastation has dimmed what was already a faint light on progress toward sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in South Asia. Today, millions in Pakistan lack access to essential health services, including medicine, contraception, and a safe place to give birth — be it in hospital, or at home.
The burden of climate crises is not restricted to Pakistan — at the same time as the floods, the worst drought in 40 years has forced some 1.7 million people in Somalia, the majority of whom are girls and women, to leave their homes, walking for days or even weeks in search of water, food, and essential health care. Losing whatever access they had to sexual and reproductive health services, their ability to cope and recover from the crisis has been severely impacted. And on their journey to survive, they’ve been met by an increased risk of sexual violence, exploitation, and abuse.
Somalia and Pakistan have collectively contributed less than 1% of the emissions that are driving climate-fueled disasters and irreparable human suffering. This climate injustice — the likes of which low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have been calling out for over thirty years — has never been a more visible, incontestable part of daily life.
In our professional life, we are trained to not let emotions drive our work — yet I’m frustrated. I’m sad. But mostly, I’m angry at a world in which looking on passively at tragedy from behind screens, or half-heartedly acknowledging wrongdoing with remorse from behind podiums, is accepted as being enough.
When the waters recede and the rain comes, what will we be left with? This question finally made it on the agenda — and in the outcome agreement — of last month’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt. Activists had been trying for years and finally succeeded, in part due to the unwavering and unifying negotiations led by Pakistani youth activists and civil society organizations and the government’s skilled delegation, which presided over a coalition of 134 developing countries (known as the G77 plus China). Together, they demanded that the world’s richest countries and biggest polluters take responsibility for the uneven impacts of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable. Unlike in years past, they made solid headway: COP27 delegates agreed to establish a “funding arrangement for responding to loss and damage,” intended to create a mechanism for large economies to help LMICs pay for the devastation that results from climate disasters.
Explicit reminders from Pakistan’s chief COP27 negotiator, Nebeel Munir, that “loss and damage is not charity, it’s climate justice,” unfiltered truths from young Pakistani climate justice advocate Ayisha Siddiqa, and unrelenting pressure from grassroots civil society leaders, who have been working for decades to demand justice and reparations for the uneven impacts of climate change, are a testament to the power of collective action to force open doors that have long been barred.
Since 2021, we’ve been working to drive collective action on climate justice as part of the SRHR & Climate Justice Coalition, which we co-convened to support decision-makers in understanding that climate justice, SRHR, and gender equality go hand in hand. By working in coalition, led by women, youth, girls, the LGBTQIA+ community, and Indigenous people from LMICs, we strive to present those in power with the evidence they need to make climate justice the priority. At COP27, we developed a set of recommendations to better integrate SRHR within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s plan to advance gender-responsive climate action.
Our work is far from over. The UNFCCC’s gender action plan remains just that: a plan, words on paper describing what we should do, not what has been done. And as of today, COP27’s loss and damage arrangement is an empty pot — an I owe you. Who is paying and who will be paid, and how money will get into the hands of the people who need it most, including the girls and women who can’t afford to wait another day for real change to happen, remains to be seen.
The promise of funding for “loss and damage,” which should be more accurately described as “reparations,” won’t make up for the deeply inequitable human and financial toll of our warming planet. But it does represent a small glimmer of hope — a step toward some semblance of justice in our collective struggle to support and prioritize the most vulnerable, curb climate change, and create a more gender-equal world for all people.
While the loss and damage arrangement is a first pivotal step toward the goal of climate justice, without follow through, the promise of true reparations will remain little more than empty rhetoric.
In the words of Pakistani human rights and land defender, Ayisha Siddiqa “You can’t negotiate with nature. There will come a time when no dollar amount will be able to make up for what is lost and broken.”
Led by the countries, feminist organizations, and girls and women who are closest to and living the impacts of climate injustice, it’s time to do the work needed both to recover and set the stage for a future in which we all can thrive. Let us collectively demand that those that contribute the least to climate crises not continue to suffer from it the most.
