Poor Nations 'Paying Twice' For Climate Breakdown

Failure to tackle crisis will create ibn refugees by 2050, summit warned

- Patrick Greenfield, Fiona Harvey and Nina Lakhani

Barbados leader castigates rich nations over climate support for poor countries

Industrialised nations were condemned for failing the developing world on the climate crisis, in a blistering attack at the Cop27 UN climate talks by the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley.

She said the prosperity – and high carbon emissions – of the rich world had been achieved at the expense of the poor in times past, and now the poor were being forced to pay again, as victims of climate breakdown that they did not cause.

“We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution. Are we now to face double jeopardy by having to pay the cost as a result of greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution? That is fundamentally unfair,” she said.

She warned of a billion climate refugees around the world by the middle of the century if governments failed to tackle the climate crisis.

One of the biggest issues at the talks is climate justice – the fact that poor people are bearing the brunt of the damage to the climate, in the form of extreme weather, while rich countries have failed to live up to their promises to cut emissions and to provide finance to help the poor with climate breakdown.

Mottley, speaking at an event organised by Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was scathing about the World Bank, which many countries think has not done enough to focus on the climate, and on countries that offer loans instead of grants.