Flood-hit Pakistan seeks loss and damage ‘compensation’ at COP27

Flood-hit Pakistan seeks loss and damage ‘compensation’ at COP27

KARACHI - Pakistan's climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, is heading to Egypt for the U.N. COP27 climate summit with one goal: finally getting the world to commit to helping countries like hers deal with the growing "loss and damage" caused by global warming.

As richer nations focus on debating how to slow rising temperatures while still producing the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions, poorer places are already suffering the consequences of a hotter climate and more extreme weather, from worsening floods and droughts to deadly heat and rising sea levels.

Pakistan has been battered by back-to-back climate catastrophes in recent years - floods, heatwaves and forest fires - and is struggling to find the funding it needs to recover from unprecedented flooding that started in June, inundating a third of the country.

"We have repeatedly made the moral case for loss and damage compensations at different platforms," Rehman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "We will deliver the same message at COP27."

"Loss and damage" refers to the harm and destruction that happens when people and places are not prepared for climate-driven impacts, and have not or cannot adjust the way they live to protect themselves from longer-term shifts.

Nine years ago, U.N. climate negotiators agreed