Saleemul Huq talking:
We’ve been trying to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases to prevent climate change. We failed. We then tried to do adapt to climate change and provide assistance to developing countries to adapt and prepare. We haven’t been able to do enough of that. So we are now left with the inevitable consequence of failing to mitigate and failing to adapt, which is inevitable losses and damages or residual losses and damages.
Just to give you an illustration that people will understand, with Hurricane Haiyan in the Philippines just a few days ago, the Philippines is considered to be quite well adapted to hurricanes. They get over 20 a year. They get warnings, they go to the shelters; we don’t hear about it. This time they got the warning, they went to the shelters, and they died in the shelters, because it was a supercyclone, unprecedented, that the shelters that protected them for the last 20 cyclones didn’t protect them from this one. You couldn’t predict it.
So that’s the difference between adapting and loss and damage. There are limits to how much you can adapt. There will be—we will cross those limits. There will be losses and damages that are unavoidable. We need a place to talk about them. And that’s what the developing countries are asking for here: a mechanism, an institutional arrangement, that enables them to discuss what to do about these inevitable losses and damages.
they were negotiating, I think, in fairly good faith with the Annex I countries, the European Union, the Americans, etc. They were making progress. And about 4:00 a.m. in the morning, the Australians put brackets around everything.
basically they disagreed with everything that had been agreed already between all the other parties. And they said they don’t agree. And that’s—that was like the last straw, after they had spent hours and hours of sincere negotiations with everybody. And the G-77 negotiators just felt this was not serious, and they left.
– source democracynow.org
Saleemul Huq, Bangladeshi-born scientist with the climate change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development.