by Reade Fenner ‘22

Following the end of the two-week COP26 United Nations climate summit held in Glasgow, Scotland, many countries made agreements in an effort to reduce the impact of climate change. The UN resolved to continue putting pressure on developed nations to cut their emissions and the resolution urged countries around the world to phase out fossil fuels. However, developing countries will continue to suffer at the hands of climate change, unable to fend for themselves in a world impacted by environmental tragedies they did not cause. A pitiful compromise was made at the summit called the “Glasgow dialogue” stating that developed countries and developing nations will begin to discuss the damages caused by climate change in the near future.

Another disappointment for developing nations was the broken $100 billion promise from developed countries. Twelve years ago at a climate summit in Copenhagen, many rich nations agreed to provide developing nations with annual funds adding up to $100 billion by 2020. This promise has fallen short, with the annual funding at only $80 billion in 2019 and most of this coming in the form of loans, which developing countries cannot afford to pay off.

Developed nations must take responsibility for their historical role in global warming and help fund developing countries in their battles against climate change. During the Industrial Revolution, rich countries such as the U.K. and the United States started emitting carbon dioxide, and therefore introduced the threat of climate change. Rich Western countries have had decades to benefit from carbon emissions and now refuse to acknowledge the damage they have caused and continue to cause. Some of the nations currently contributing most to climate change include the U.S., Canada, Australia, and South Korea, highly developed countries who have been polluting for far longer than developing ones.

Less developed countries are also the nations most impacted by climate change because they must battle hotter temperatures, since most are close to the equator. Facing droughts, forced displacement as a result of rising seas levels, increases in devastating natural disasters, heat waves, and wildfires, developing nations carry the burden of developed nations’ carbon emissions. People in Kenya are starving because they cannot grow food due to a disastrous drought, while people in Haiti are pummeled year after year by catastrophic hurricanes.

Rich nations need to take responsibility for the climate crisis they began and help developing countries facing the worse impacts to fight it, as they do not have the infrastructure or resources to do so themselves. “It is unjust and it is immoral,” said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley about developed countries’ refusal to provide sufficient funding at the COP26 summit. “It is wrong.”