Climate Vulnerable Nations Launch Payment Overdue

By Prof. Dr. Saleemul Huq, OBE, Chair of CVF Expert Advisory Group (EAG)

The CVF and V20 have launched an important new Loss and Damage campaign today and I want to encourage you to take part.

Attending UN Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) meetings since the very beginning, I have witnessed the evolving priorities of climate policy over the years. After decades of insufficient action from big, powerful, and wealthy nations whether on adaptation, mitigation, finance, capacity or technology, the unfortunate reality of today is that loss and damage has become the paramount issue for climate policy. Loss and damage punish above all the poor, the vulnerable, and those least responsible for – and least equipped to handle – the severe and mounting catastrophes brought about by the climate crisis. Some 1.5 billion of these people living in 55 nations across all world regions are represented by the Climate Vulnerable Forum or CVF.

The CVF has decided to make a loss and damage its key communications issue in 2022 by launching an online social campaign entitled “Payment Overdue.” The campaign is asking for the biggest polluting nations to finally pay up for Loss & Damage. It aims to raise awareness of L&D, build support and attract funds to address L&D, and it aims to promote sharing of L&D solutions.

I fully support this CVF and V20 campaign and I encourage the public and organizations to also get behind it and link up by encouraging individuals to sign their handraiser and to engage with it online including by using their digital toolkit.

More details are available on the main campaign page here.

And finally, the campaign’s hashtags will be:
English: #PaymentOverdue #TimeToPayUp
French: #PaiementEchu #IlEstTempsDePayer
Spanish: #PagoVencido #EsHoraDePagar

Loss & Damage is a tragedy, but on the bright side we also have a level of momentum on L&D issues that I have never seen before. So let’s double down on that and keep up the pressure !

I have also written a more detailed article on the importance of paying up for loss and damage in my regular column which can be found on the Daily Star Bangladesh website which can be found here.