Young activists urge focus on cash for climate damage at COP27

Young climate activists come together to build bridges of solidarity across movements in the Global South

The main focus of this year's COP27 climate summit should be working out who pays the bill for damage caused by global warming, young activists say.

World leaders will gather in Egypt in November to discuss how the world deals with rising temperatures.

Poorer countries want rich ones to pay for damage caused by climate change and the extreme weather associated with it.

Youth activists meeting ahead of COP27 say it must deal with this long-running issue of "loss and damage".

The issue was a source of acrimony between rich and poor countries at recent climate talks in Germany.

Last week, almost 400 activists from 65 countries attended the 'Climate Justice Camp' in Tunisia.

Coming from some of the parts of the world that are most affected by climate change, they met with the goal of securing "a fair response to the climate crisis at COP27 and beyond".

Climate change "is my reality wherever I look," says Pakistani activist Ayisha Siddiqa

Experts called the recent floods in Pakistan which left almost 1,700 people dead a "wake-up call" on the threats of climate change.

"We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people currently living in shanty towns, sleeping in tents under the sky. There are dead bodies still floating in the water," said Ayisha Siddiqa, the 23-year-old co-founder of Polluters Out and Fossil Free University, who is from a tribal community in the northern Pakistan.

"Women are pregnant and they're expected to give birth into the flooded water. How has (climate change) directly impacted me? It is my reality wherever I look."

Poorer countries want a new fund to be created that would pay for the damage from extreme events that they are unable to adapt to - such as fast rising seas.

They want richer countries like the US and the EU to contribute to this fund because they are the biggest historic contributors to climate change. Wealthier nations object, saying they could be on the hook for billions of dollars for centuries to come if they accept the principal of responsibility.

Ms Siddiqa said she hoped that COP27 would be "step one" toward creating such a fund.

"It's not the rich nations' onus or charity, it's their responsibility," she said. "In fact, it's an insurance policy because what is happening now in Pakistan will indeed become the reality of the global North."

"All we need is political will," says Maria Reyes

Omar Elmawi, a 34-year-old Kenyan who coordinates the Stop East African Crude Pipeline campaign, also wants richer countries to shoulder what he sees as their responsibilities at COP27.

"I know I'll be disappointed," he said. "I hope that there will be some commitments around loss and damage so that the people who've contributed to this problem at last will take some action to rectify the problems that we are in today."

Maria Reyes, a 20-year-old representative from Mexico of the Indigenous Futures Network, said that moving forward on the issue of loss and damage depended on people from affected countries and cultures having a real voice at such meetings.

"All that we need is political will," she said. "All that we need is someone who is in the right seat, in the right place, who was born in the right country… to want to sign a paper, to want to open their wallet and put the money on the table for things to actually happen."