Nepal floods should mobilise climate action - UN

Nepal’s flood disaster and Europe’s wildfires should turn attention to the cost of climate change, the head of the world’s biggest climate fund said in an interview.

Mafalda Duarte, executive director of the UN’s multi-billion-dollar Green Climate Fund, said many countries do not understand that the world faces tipping points from which it cannot go back.

“We see globally climate change dropping in terms of priorities, with other things – conflicts and shocks – taking priority,” she told AFP.

“We see when there is will, that finance is mobilised to respond to emergencies. For some reason, we don’t see the same type of response to climate – as if we can afford to wait.”

The Green Climate Fund was established by the UN to help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change, and has invested $19 billion (€16.4 billion) across 134 developing countries.

The US withdrew from the fund in January, and Britain halved its contribution in May.

The devastation caused by the Nepal flood disaster should return political focus to climate change, Ms Duarte said.

“I would hope that this, plus the heatwaves this summer, plus the wildfires… These things are now happening everywhere. This is not a phenomenon of developing countries,” she said, referencing the deadly fires and heatwave across much of Europe.

Ms Duarte is in Palau for the annual summit of Pacific island leaders, who see climate change as their biggest security threat.

Pacific governments reacted with dismay to a UN report that found the world would fail to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, hastening climate impacts.

“It always surprises me as to how we can have so much information, and can act so little,” she said.

“We cannot give up hope,” she added.

The fund is increasing its work on adaptation in the Pacific, and has doubled its investment in the region in three years to $1 billion.

Acknowledging there is frustration among small countries accessing the fund, Ms Duarte said the process has sped up to an average nine months.

The climate envoy for the Marshall Islands Tina Stege, the Pacific’s envoy for COP31, said that “urgent and concrete” progress was needed to improve access to climate finance for small island states.

She said a separate UN “loss and damage” fund, agreed four years ago to help developing nations respond to climate disasters, was “an empty bucket”.