Climate justice for small island developing states: identifying appropriate international financing mechanisms for loss and damage

Excerpt from tandfonline.com

The inclusion of Article 8 in the 2015 Paris Agreement was, in part, an achievement of the advocacy efforts of small island developing states (SIDS) that sought recognition of climate-related loss and damage (L&D) in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

However, when a decision of the Conference of the Parties established that Article 8 of the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation, SIDS were left with limited options for financing L&D through the UNFCCC, delaying needed climate justice in view of their negligible contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Since then, several studies have evaluated a range of L&D financing options but without explicitly accounting for whether they can deliver justice for SIDS. In this article, we qualitatively analyze the appropriateness of five of the international financial mechanisms that scholars have argued should be urgently considered by the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism under the UNFCCC – levies on (1) airline travel, (2) fossil fuel extraction, (3) GHG emissions, (4) bunker fuel usage, and (5) financial transactions. Our results indicate that no single mechanism will deliver the justice that SIDS need but that, of the five mechanisms, airline travel levies and fossil fuel extraction levies are likely to be the most appropriate. Going forward, and as climate-related weather events intensify, a suite of fair, dependable, feasible, and suitable L&D financial mechanisms will be needed to better account for the special circumstances of SIDS.