“We are already living with loss and damages for the last 25 years,” said Adriana Vasquez Rodriquez from the Association La Ruta del Clima, a Costa Rican environmental group.
“We have families who have lost their houses, their crops, their lives, and no-one is paying for that, we are running out of resources, and at the same time, we are depending on debt.”
Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg is one who has previously implied the West owes a “historical debt” to countries in the Global South to drastically reduce carbon emissions due to the legacy of colonialism.
According to the BBC report, developing nations argue climate change they are experiencing has been caused by historic carbon emissions that originated in richer countries.
They say Europe and the U.S. have a responsibility now to pay for these losses and damages.
This is not the first time a demand for reparations from successful economies has been made or for special concessions to be granted to “climate refugees.”
As Breitbart News reported, officials at the United Nations COP25 climate change conference in Madrid back in 2019 heard the same plea.
Green groups claimed then the “increased pace and intensity of climate disasters,” means funding needs boosting to keep track.
At the current conference in Bonn, Germany, climate campaigners went much further than the diplomats after having flown in from 200 countries around the world to state their case.
“Vulnerable nations are being betrayed by rich countries. The E.U., U.S., others have been blocking progress on loss and damage finance,” tweeted Tasneem Essop from CAN International.
“We are extremely disappointed at what’s happening at the negotiations at Bonn.”
The amount demanded by activists for loss and damage inflicted by prosperous nations would top $300 billion annually by 2030.