UAE’s $100m leads climate disaster fund Cop28 pledges

Cop28/Mahmoud Khaled

• Deal is the summit’s first milestone
• Fund to support suffering countries 
• UAE and Germany commit $100m each

Negotiators at Cop28 in Dubai struck the first deal of the summit on Thursday evening, officially agreeing to set up a fund to help vulnerable countries recover from damage caused by climate change. 

The plan to create a United Nations-led “loss and damage” fund was hailed as a breakthrough for negotiations at Cop27 in Egypt last year. 

But it has since proved challenging to achieve consensus on the fund’s size, operation and the exact contributions from developed and developing nations. 

Significant progress was made during pre-Cop28 talks in Abu Dhabi at the start of November, when a special UN committee tasked with implementing the fund agreed on a set of recommendations to be put to governments during the summit. 

Today, countries agreed to operationalise the fund, and many nations announced the size of their financial commitment.

The UAE pledged $100 million, as did Germany, while the UK committed £40 million (about $50 million) to the fund and £20 million for “other arrangements”, according to the Cop28 UAE presidency. 

The US committed $17.5 million and Japan committed $10 million. The original proposal last year was that the climate damage fund should provide a minimum of $100 billion by 2030. 

“The hard work of many people over many years has been delivered in Dubai,” Cop28 president Sultan Al Jaber said.

“The speed at which the world came together to get this fund operationalised within one year since parties agreed to it in Sharm El Sheikh is unprecedented.” 

Details as to how exactly the fund will work are yet to be announced. But the official agreement to establish it provides “significant momentum” as the two-week summit kicks off, Cop28 UAE stated. 

“The Cop28 presidency will continue to drive commitments, collaboration and solidarity through the presidency and will work with parties to finalise the details of how the fund will work,” it said. 

The fund is a key plank of the summit’s ambition to protect the livelihoods of billions of people, mainly in developing nations, who are especially vulnerable to the social, environmental and economic impacts of climate change.