In response to the closing of the ninth meeting of the Board of the Fund for responding to Loss & Damage (FRLD), ActionAid USA’s Director of Policy & Campaigns, Brandon Wu, said:
“This week’s meeting of the FRLD Board was a deeply frustrating experience. It took place mostly behind closed doors, including for completely non-controversial agenda items. The Board held most of its key discussions without the public having any ability to observe, much less provide input. We expect future meetings to be conducted with far more openness and transparency.
The Board chose not to approve the first four funding requests for the FRLD at this meeting. This is the most obvious example of how developed countries’ failure to adequately resource the FRLD is constraining a fund that was meant to be the central flagship institution responding to climate impacts across the Global South. Almost three years after it was established, the FRLD has received a miserable $500 million in contributions, compared to $2.8 billion of requests in the pipeline.
We need immediate new contributions to the FRLD to ensure it can support the full range of requests from developing countries, rather than becoming a dystopian arena where countries and communities are condemned to fight over crumbs.”
ENDS
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About ActionAid
ActionAid is a global federation working with more than 41 million people living in more than 71 of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, fair, and sustainable world in which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty.