The highly advertised 27th meeting of the parties to the global Climate Change Accord is still underway in the Egyptian seaside resort and participating nations are deliberating on the highly crucial loss and damage issue. The United Nations and climate-hit countries including Pakistan are urging global polluters to share their losses caused by the catastrophe generated by the reckless growth of developed nations. Interestingly, the major contributors to global warming fail to achieve the goal of US $ 100 billion annual investment in climate-related projects since 2020. The recent climate-induced events in certain parts of the world had further added pressure on developed nations to assist climate-victim states. The government of Pakistan was hopeful about the COP27 gathering for getting relief in its foreign debts, along with substantial aid for the rehabilitation of flood-hit areas but these expectations largely remained unrealized while the COP 27 meetup closes down on November 17.
In fact, Pakistani authorities could not adopt a consistent policy regarding their expectations from the global community in respect of flood relief, reconstruction, and rehabilitation of flood-affected regions. Pakistan initially demanded debt relief from global lenders and later refused to request the Paris Club to waive off its loans in the wake of the disastrous flood in the country. Then the Pakistani government stressed that developed nations should compensate Pakistan for flood damage by contributing toward the country’s rehabilitation efforts, whereas UN Secretary-General appealed to the international financial institutions and G 20 countries to provide debt relief to Pakistan to help its post-flood reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts at the inaugural session of the COP 27. Hence, this inexplicit policy could not produce a positive result so far.
Apparently, people around the world are demanding real solutions to the evergrowing worst effects of global warming to keep global temperature below 1.5 celsius, whereas the western nations and multinational corporations who caused this havoc are using global climate agenda and net zero doctrines to clean wash their image and further boost their businesses in another way. After the two days meetup of the global leaders, the COP27 was a weeklong practice of delegates’ plenary meetings, think tanks discussions, and corporation-sponsored events highlighting the importance of green energy, capacity building, national resilience, investment, and multilateral cooperation to coup the climate-related challenges by the world nations, which clearly illustrates the west’s pro-business policy in this regard.
In fact, vulnerable countries under extreme public debt cannot be left alone to deal with the impact of climate catastrophe created by others, as well as the developed nation must not seize this opportunity to boost the businesses of their corporation instead of fulfilling their contribution categorically agreed upon under the Paris Accord. Otherwise, the climate-hit nations must go to the ICJ to get climate justice, because their losses would double every coming year.
