"step up, pay up"

Hussain Rasheed Hassan, environment minister of the low-lying Maldives, said, "Our people are paying a huge cost because some countries are dumping a huge amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the world's oceans are getting warmer," he said.

To keep out tidal waves and flooding, the Maldives will have to pay for sea walls and other protective measures, he said. For that, it will need to borrow money from banks, and pay interest.

Even though Hassan's country has produced only a tiny fraction of the fossil fuel emissions driving climate change, "we have to beg some of these big emitters to provide money for us. Is that fair? Really, I don't think so," he told an event led by atoll states on the sidelines of the talks.

Other vulnerable countries, including African nations are experiencing more intense droughts and floods. A U.N. report indicates that African countries are paying between 2 to 9 percent of their GDP on adapting to climate change, a phenomenon caused by the developed world and Asian Tigers. And according to Dr James Murombedzi, a policy expert at the U.N., most of these expenditures are never budgeted for.

Ambassador Mohamed Nasr, the  African Group of Negotiators  chair and the Head of Environmental Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Egypt, told journalists that the Paris Agreement, which was passed in 2015, had little understanding or acknowledgement for Africa’s special circumstances. The argument is that the African continent emits a mere 4 percent of the total greenhouse gases emitted globally, yet climate-related impacts are enormous, and science has shown that the situation is only going to worsen in the near future. 

"... if the global temperatures rise by 1.5° Celsius, then Africa will experience 3.5, and this is a clear reason why the continent must never be treated the same way as the rest of the world,” said Nasr.

• In 2011, for example, the Horn of Africa region experienced a severe drought that claimed over 260,000 lives, making it one of the worst mass atrocities ever experienced in the region, according to the United Nations Dispatch.
• Another drought followed five years later in 2017, and in the first six months of 2019 there was another devastating drought in the region affecting more than 15.3 million people according to the United Nations.

Immediately after the drought, the Horn of Africa region expected a short rainy season, which usually begins in April. But this didn’t occur and instead the entire region is currently experiencing heavy downpours, which meteorological experts say is due to the warming of the Indian Ocean.

• So far, the region has had more than 300 percent above average rainfall, and this has resulted in floods, mudslides, and the collapse of buildings – which has caused the deaths to hundreds of people, while displacing thousands of households in the region.
• And when the floods eventually end, the region is expected to become a hotspot of waterborne diseases and other climate-related diseases such as malaria.
• At the same time the southern part of the continent is experiencing what farmers say is the worst drought they can remember.
• And earlier this year, Cyclones Idai and Kenneth, whose intensity and occurrence was attributed to  climate change, swept through Southern Africa affecting more than 2.2 million people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

“Science has already warned that Africa was going to be the most impacted by climate change, and some of the disasters we are witnessing are just but a tip of the iceberg,” Augustine Njamnshi, a Cameroonian environmental legal expert, told IPS. “We need funds to help our people develop resilience to these disasters, we need to give them appropriate technologies to enable them adapt, and we also need to consider that some of the problems they are experiencing are not their own making, and therefore it is injustice for them,” Njamnshi said.

Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change policy for charity ActionAid International, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation the best that could be hoped for now in Madrid was the creation of an expert group to look into potential new sources of finance.