Wamuyu Manyara is country director for Trócaire Malawi and Tarcizio Kalaundi is its climate resilience officer.
This week, the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) faces a significant decision that will determine its ability to address the harms being done by climate change.
Discussions on the Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must get the scale and accessibility of the Fund right. Failure to do so would risk undermining its role to channel finance to countries experiencing loss and damage, and undermine obligations to climate justice and human rights.
This discussion could not come at a more pressing time. As loss and damage (L&D) continues to escalate globally, and as the world teeters perilously close to the Paris Agreement’s critical 1.5C warming limit, the FRLD also faces the very real danger of running out of funding in 2027.
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Wamuyu Manyara is country director for Trócaire Malawi and Tarcizio Kalaundi is its climate resilience officer.
This week, the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) faces a significant decision that will determine its ability to address the harms being done by climate change.
Discussions on the Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must get the scale and accessibility of the Fund right. Failure to do so would risk undermining its role to channel finance to countries experiencing loss and damage, and undermine obligations to climate justice and human rights.
This discussion could not come at a more pressing time. As loss and damage (L&D) continues to escalate globally, and as the world teeters perilously close to the Paris Agreement’s critical 1.5C warming limit, the FRLD also faces the very real danger of running out of funding in 2027.
As Nigeria rails at loss and damage “mirage”, fund boss assures money is coming
Experts calculate that in 2025, L&D finance needs for climate-vulnerable countries may have reached USD$937 billion. Last year’s major impacts included a series of extremely destructive cyclones that hit the Philippines, estimated to have caused over $5 billion in losses, while in Jamaica, the losses and damage caused by Hurricane Melissa were estimated at $12.2 billion.
The bill for just one of these disasters would exhaust the Fund’s existing resources many times over. While the costs and human rights violations rack up, almost four years after being agreed at COP27, the FRLD remains critically underfunded.
Pledges to the Fund ($822 million) are just a fraction of 1% of annual loss and damage needs, and only around half of those pledges ($448 million) have been paid into the Fund so far.
Meanwhile, those who have done nothing to cause the climate crisis are facing its worst – and intensifying – impacts and are being left to foot the bill for the damages already incurred, not to mention the severe non-economic costs to communities. It is therefore crucial that the FRLD’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy urgently brings in far more L&D finance.
Contributor conundrum
Many developed states will claim that additional countries should provide L&D finance. This, however, is a distraction – particularly considering the deep abyss between the contributions of developed states that are obligated to pay and their fair share as calculated according to their wealth and historical emissions. Furthermore, some states and regions that are currently not obligated to contribute are already doing so.
Analysis reveals that, even in the highly inequitable scenario where all states including those who have contributed nothing to causing the climate crisis were to pay towards L&D finance, wealthy countries would still be responsible for the vast majority of L&D finance.
The Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must focus political discussions on the ability of rich and highly polluting states to raise public, grant-based L&D finance that is new and additional to existing climate finance obligations and overseas development assistance.
Developed states have the means to pay and the FRLD should introduce mandatory and progressive mechanisms to make the biggest polluters, including the ultra-rich and fossil fuel corporations, pay for their climate harms.
African impacts
Increasingly unpredictable seasons and more frequent and extreme events are driving food insecurity, malnutrition, displacement and other human rights risks in climate-vulnerable countries, and communities facing these escalating and compounding impacts must be centred in FRLD policies.
In Ethiopia, 2023 saw 24 million people affected by five back-to-back failed rains leading to severe food and water shortages, including a 90% crop loss in drought-affected areas. Eleven million people required food assistance, and over 500,000 people were displaced. Meanwhile, the 2023–24 floods and the 2024 Gofa landslide disrupted or destroyed health facilities, displaced thousands, and led to outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and measles.
Comment: Let’s tax luxury air travel to fund climate adaptation and loss and damage
Today, Somalia is facing one of its most severe drought emergencies in recent history driven by climate extremes. Malnutrition rates continue to exceed projections and previous devastating records, with 1.9 million children in Somalia acutely malnourished.
In Malawi, child stunting had significantly reduced, but climate impacts are now affecting children’s growth and development. Tropical Cyclone Freddy in 2023 was one of the worst on record, causing over 1,200 deaths, displacing half a million people, and causing damages exceeding $500 million. Recovery needs for four major disasters between 2015 and 2023 are estimated at $1.7 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of Malawi’s 2026-2027 budget.
Funding for communities
Access to community grants in the southern African country, however, has catalysed local responses to L&D that coordinate around immediate and long-term needs and restoring livelihoods.
Direct access to the FRLD for climate-vulnerable countries and communities, with community-centric planning, is essential to ensure that the Fund can respond to the needs of people experiencing the worst impacts of climate change, through prompt and flexible mechanisms that do not hinder recovery options.
Stepping up to fill the FRLD through an ambitious and needs-based Resource Mobilisation Strategy is the bare minimum that wealthy states can and must do. It is, after all, an obligation that flows from the international duties of cooperation and prevention of harm, and from the obligation to provide reparation when harm occurs. Failure to do so would further erode climate justice and human rights for communities on the frontline of loss and damage.
