Climate representatives gathered in Kinshasa for pre-COP27 call for more funding

Climate representatives from more than 40 countries who gathered for a pre-COP27 climate summit in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, have called out rich nations for failing to honor a $100bn per year funding pledge to developing countries.
Dozens of ministers and senior delegates are in Kinshasa this week for a final meeting before the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, where more vulnerable countries hope to push for compensation for economic losses linked to climate catastrophes. The Congolese prime minister led calls on Monday (3 October) for a surge in funding to stop global warming and fight its impacts, warning that fair finance was needed to avert the worst of the climate crisis. “I hope that the discussions will include the cases of the leading forces, the result of which has been some European countries returning to the use of polluting energy sources they had previously banned in order to avoid the incalculable consequences of an energy deficit imposed on them by the war in Ukraine,“ said DRC Prime-Minister Jean Michel Sama Lukonde.
Egypt, which is hosting COP27, is working on how to include this kind of compensation for so-called loss and damage on the formal agenda — a task complicated by industrialized nations’ wariness of the liabilities they may face. The pre-summit is meant to be a forum for countries to shape the agenda for negotiations in Egypt and improve the chance of progress. DRC, like other African nations, has insisted on its right to develop its economy by exploiting its vast natural resources, pledging to minimize the potentially devastating environmental impact by using modern drilling methods and tight regulation.