Stimulus

When the international community meets to bargain over the climate crisis, two very different demands sit on the table. The first is mitigation finance, money channelled to help developing states cut their own future emissions through renewable energy and cleaner industry. The second is loss and damage compensation, money that acknowledges harms already suffered from storms, flooding and drought that can no longer be prevented or adapted to. At COP27 in Egypt in 2022, states agreed in principle to create a dedicated Loss and Damage Fund, and at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates in 2023 they operationalised it with initial pledges.

The distinction matters politically because it reframes who owes what to whom. Mitigation finance treats climate action as a shared investment in a common future, while loss and damage frames the issue as historical responsibility for harm already inflicted. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a coalition of low-lying nations facing existential threat, has argued for decades that pledges to cut future emissions do nothing for communities already losing their coastlines. Wealthier states have often resisted the language of compensation, fearing it implies unbounded legal liability.

Adapted from "The Price of Harm Already Done: Climate Finance After COP28" by Dr Amara Okonjo, Global Environmental Governance Review (2024).

Stimulus

Text extract (adapted): "The shale revolution transformed the United States from a large energy importer into the world's biggest producer of both oil and natural gas. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling unlocked tight oil and shale gas across states such as Texas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania, and politicians of both major parties embraced 'energy independence' as a strategic prize. The same government that rejoined the Paris Agreement and passed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in US history, also presided over record crude output. Supporters argue cheap domestic gas and clean-energy subsidies can advance security and decarbonisation together; critics counter that expanding fossil production locks in emissions and contradicts the country's climate pledges."

Stimulus

The world's great forests raise a hard question about who controls them. Under the principle of national resource sovereignty, a state has the right to exploit, conserve or clear the resources within its own borders as it sees fit. Yet tropical forests such as the Amazon and the rainforests of Southeast Asia are also framed as part of a global commons, carbon sinks and biodiversity reserves whose loss threatens everyone. Brazil created the Amazon Fund in 2008 to receive international donations for forest protection, and its use of that money has risen and fallen with successive governments' forest policies.

The tension is sharpest when outside actors attach conditions to their money. Norway and Germany, the Amazon Fund's main donors, froze contributions when deforestation accelerated under one administration, then resumed them when policy shifted. In Indonesia, the world's largest palm oil producer, the government has defended its right to develop plantations for jobs and export income, while facing international pressure over forest clearance and peatland fires. Governments in both countries argue that lecturing from wealthy, already-deforested nations amounts to an infringement of sovereignty.

Adapted from "Whose Forest Is It? Sovereignty and the Global Commons" by Professor Luis Ferreira, Journal of Environmental Sovereignty Studies (2023).

Stimulus

Data extract (adapted): The table below summarises the design of ICAO's Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) and one estimate of projected international aviation emissions.

Stimulus

Pollution rarely respects national boundaries, and this creates a gap between where environmental law is made and where its harm is felt. Domestic environmental regulation operates within a single state, which can set and enforce rules over industry inside its borders. Transboundary harm occurs when the pollution generated in one state crosses into another, where the affected government has no authority over the source. Southeast Asia's recurring haze, caused largely by fires set to clear land for agriculture and plantations, drifts across borders and blankets neighbouring countries in choking smoke each dry season.

In response, member states adopted the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution in 2002, committing to cooperate on prevention and monitoring, though enforcement has remained weak. A parallel problem appears in the global plastic-waste trade. After China banned most plastic-waste imports in 2018, exporters redirected their waste to Southeast Asian states with limited processing capacity, shifting the burden of disposal across borders. In both cases, the state that suffers the harm is not the state that produced it.

Adapted from "Smoke and Waste Across Borders: The Limits of Domestic Regulation" by Dr Nadia Rahman, Southeast Asian Environmental Policy Journal (2022).