More than 250 organizations – representing thousands of civil society, faith-based, and Indigenous Peoples’ groups – have issued an urgent open letter coordinated by the Fill The Fund campaign. Their demand to the Board of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) is unequivocal: implement a human rights-based Resource Mobilization Strategy (RMS) capable of delivering at least $400 billion annually by 2035.
The letter arrives just one week before the FRLD Board’s eighth meeting, where members will make critical decisions regarding the Fund’s start-up phase, known as the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM). The open letter forces the Board to confront an uncomfortable reality: if the RMS fails to deliver, the Fund could run completely out of money by 2027.
Currently, the gap between what has been promised and what is required is staggering. To date, pledges to the FRLD total just $822.06 million USD, with a mere $448.61 million USD actually paid into the fund. This amounts to less than 0.1 percent of the $400 billion scientists estimate the Fund must disburse annually by 2035 just to begin meeting the escalating needs of developing countries.
Established in 2022 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) after more than 30 years of tireless advocacy by civil society and developing nations, the FRLD was celebrated as a beacon of hope for the global climate justice movement.
Yet, without drastically scaled-up and reliable funding, advocates warn that this historic victory risks becoming an empty shell.
Harjeet Singh, Global Convenor, Fill The Fund Campaign and Founding Director, Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, based in India, said:
“There is an insulting chasm between the few million dollars currently trickling into the Fund and the hundreds of billions urgently required on the ground. Vulnerable communities across the Global South are already bearing the catastrophic and disproportionate costs of climate inaction.
We did not spend three decades fighting for a hollow mechanism that merely shuffles around loose change. This Fund was established to deliver hundreds of billions of dollars annually to meet real, escalating needs – and we will not accept anything less.”
ENDS
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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. n 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.
