But while governments have channelled increasing sums of money towards dealing with climate change in recent years, ocean issues have often missed out. \u201cUnfortunately, the ocean is largely viewed as either being out of sight and out of mind, or too big to fail,\u201d says Karen Sack, executive director of the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), which works to incentivise investment in coastal and ocean environmental projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Loss and damage, the third pillar of climate finance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
As it becomes clearer how much damage climate change is already doing and could yet do, calls have grown for richer countries responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions to provide money to poorer ones in the form of climate finance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So far, this money has gone largely towards climate change \u201cmitigation\u201d, meaning action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions \u2013 such as shutting down coal-fired power stations \u2013 or to remove them from the atmosphere. It has also gone towards \u201cadaptation\u201d: actions to cope with a climate-changed world, like building stronger sea walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u201cthird pillar\u201d<\/a> of payments, for loss and damage incurred due to climate change, has proven more controversial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the most recent global climate talks, COP28 in Dubai, the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund was finally agreed after years of discussion. Some USD 700 million<\/a> was pledged to the nascent fund, which the World Bank was given an initial four-year stint<\/a> in charge of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is thought that around 600 million<\/a> people depend to some extent on fisheries and aquaculture for their livelihoods. In the highly calibrated language that characterises reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is \u201cmedium confidence<\/a>\u201d that climate change will drive changes in fish populations that \u201caffect income, livelihoods, and food security of marine resource-dependent communities\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One team, which modelled<\/a> where 779 commercially important fish species are likely to exist in 2100, found tropical nations would lose the most, with \u201cfew if any stocks replacing\u201d the departures, although the results are heavily dependent on future greenhouse gas emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But claiming for a loss of fish may not be simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michelle Tigchelaar is a climate scientist who works for WorldFish, an NGO focussing on sustainable fisheries and aquaculture in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. She fears it will be challenging to separate changes due to climate change from other pressures on fish stocks, such as overfishing and pollution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo far, most of the loss and damage reporting has focused on extreme weather events \u2013 storms, flooding, heatwaves \u2013 that are constrained in space and time,\u201d she says. \u201cFor fisheries, the losses and damages resulting from climate change \u2013 such as shifting of fish stocks and degrading coral reefs \u2013 may be slower to develop, making it more difficult to calculate a single claim.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another problem is that current data on fish catches is patchy, especially for inland fisheries and those catches that are eaten by fishers or traded outside of commercial markets. \u201cWhat isn\u2019t measured can\u2019t be compensated, putting arguably the most vulnerable small-scale fishers out of reach of loss-and-damage mechanisms,\u201d Tigchelaar warns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Climate problems will be felt especially keenly in coastal least-developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS). They are also likely to fall particularly heavily on women in these countries who often have precarious jobs in fisheries and related industries, \u201cso the Loss and Damage Fund will be fundamental to their future\u201d, says ORRAA\u2019s Sack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fund has been instructed to ringfence an as-yet-undetermined proportion of its money for SIDS and coastal LDCs. But such countries may be poorly placed to make claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDeveloping countries, in particular SIDS and LDCs, often lack historical data or the institutions, expertise and financial resources that would support \u2018attribution studies\u2019 for particular climate hazards,\u201d explains Adelle Thomas, senior director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental non-profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attribution studies calculate the extent to which<\/a> changes in Earth\u2019s weather and environment are down to anthropogenic climate change. Data for such studies is scarce in some of the developing countries<\/a> likely to be hit hardest by rising temperatures. \u201cIf attribution is a requirement for loss and damage payment, then this would be particularly unjust, as these countries who have contributed the least to climate change and lack the resources for attribution science, would then be ineligible for support,\u201d Thomas says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much will depend on how the fund decides to allocate its resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michai Robertson is a research fellow at the ODI think-tank and a former negotiator on climate finance for the Alliance of Small Island States, a negotiating bloc. He says what counts as success for funding must be carefully considered if smaller countries are to access their fair share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere\u2019s always the attractiveness of saying you\u2019ve helped X million [or] billion people; you\u2019ve addressed X dollars or pounds in losses, and it\u2019s in the billions,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the thing is, those types of metrics disadvantage smaller and least developed countries, because they\u2019re not the places where they have huge \u2026 populations or those huge economies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Small island states also face the loss of things that are less tangible than buildings and fish. In some cases, their cultural heritage and even their very existence is at risk due to rising sea levels. This opens up the issue of \u201cnon-economic loss and damage\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Funding for such damage could support, for example, building museums commemorating culture lost to rising sea levels. \u201cBefore the Loss and Damage Fund, you couldn\u2019t go to the World Bank with a project like this,\u201d says Robertson. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t go to the Green Climate Fund; you\u2019d be laughed out of the room.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Untangling where climate finance has gone, and what it has been spent on, is complicated. But some who work on ocean issues feel that money has often had a terrestrial bias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A 2022 paper<\/a> from the Asian Development Bank Institute, a Tokyo-based think-tank, identified that public finance for ocean conservation and climate action had grown from USD 579 million in 2013 to just over USD 3.5 billion in 2019. This is compared to nearly USD 130 billion in wider climate finance for developed countries between 2013 and 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n John Virdin, one of the paper\u2019s authors, is director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Program at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability in the US. He says estimates of how much global aid and public finance goes to ocean-related projects are patchy, but that it has been suggested they are \u201can order of magnitude\u201d below what is probably needed to achieve ocean conservation targets such as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSome scholars have called this the ocean finance gap,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 14th of the UN\u2019s 17 Sustainable Development Goals is to \u201cconserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This goal, focussing on \u201clife below water<\/a>\u201d, includes targets to reduce marine pollution and ocean acidification, make fishing more sustainable, support artisan fishers, and protect and restore ecosystems. Some of these targets have already been missed.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n Less than 2% of money from the Green Climate Fund \u2013 the largest of the climate funds run under the auspices of the UN climate convention \u2013 went to ocean projects, according to a 2021 estimate<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another relevant fund is the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The fund channels money to projects that support five environmental conventions, including the UN climate convention. In 2007, it came in for criticism<\/a> from some quarters because it explicitly weighted<\/a> its Global Benefits Index for Biodiversity \u2013 which helps determine the destination of funding \u2013 80% for terrestrial and 20% for marine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The GEF Secretariat says the index is just one part of the equations that go into resource allocation. \u201cOne of the challenges of developing such a system is that few datasets are global and consistently applied, so there are few options to choose from and even less in the marine realm,\u201d a spokesperson tells Dialogue Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They add that the index was updated in 2016 when there were \u201csignificant improvements in the marine data available\u201d and that currently, the weighting is 75% for terrestrial and 25% for marine biodiversity. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe problem of fleeing fish<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What isn\u2019t measured can\u2019t be compensated, putting arguably the most vulnerable small-scale fishers out of reach of loss-and-damage mechanisms<\/blockquote>Michelle Tigchelaar, climate scientist, WorldFish<\/cite><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Small islands, big problems<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"a](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Schooling-Fish_Alamy_2T6HW56-2.jpg\")
<\/div>Precedence for ocean fears<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The future of loss and damage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n