Nine meetings in, still no funds given out from Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD)

To paraphrase a famous Motorhead song: it's all about the BIM, and how you play it.

That seems to be the most unlikely way to summarize what happened at the 9th Board meeting (B9) of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD). Yet if you listen to the first full verse of that song, somehow it is oddly fitting.

The biggest agenda of this meeting, which took place on 8-10 July in the Philippines, was supposed to be on operationalizing the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM). This refers to the FRLD's pilot funding program, designed to give USD250 million of grants to climate-vulnerable countries to address climate-related losses and damages.

Yet all the bright outlook heading into this meeting disappeared quickly, and not just because another super-typhoon was also hitting the country during this time.

All about control

The dilemma of balancing urgency and due diligence has been a main story of the FRLD, especially as it remains in its early stage of operationalization. B9 was no exception.

A total of USD2.8 billion is requested by developing countries through 176 proposals in the BIM pipeline. Half of said requests came in at the 15 June deadline, which is only three weeks before the start of the recently-concluded meeting.

There simply was no feasible scenario when all those proposals would be fully assessed in a fairly and equitable manner, not with the still-limited capacity of the Fund's Secretariat. It is unjust for vulnerable nations with limited resources and capacities to lose out on the chance to get urgent support just because they took longer to finish their submissions.

These factors, among many others to be discussed below, played into the intense discourse within the Board. After three days [four, if we include the informal portion] of this meeting, the Board settled for a "package deal" involving not just the funding requests and the pipeline, but also the resource mobilization strategy (RMS) and the agenda of its next meeting.

No proposal was approved; instead, the first set of requests deemed to be ready for approval would be shown at B10. To have more time for all 176 proposals to be fully examined, the schedule of the next Board meeting was moved from October to mid-December.

Another critical agenda of this meeting, the launch of the country support system that is supposed to build country capacities to access funds, will not push through as members diverged on details on its operational modalities.

If you can pay it

Through another decision, the BIM is now formally linked to the first stage of the FRLD's RMS that also includes a more rapid conversion of over USD200 million of pledges from developed countries into actual contributions. These are key building blocks for the FRLD as it eventually transitions to a longer-term operational model.

An additional USD100 million would be added to the BIM budget for funding requests and oversight fees. Yet the fact remains that this is nowhere near enough to close that over USD2-billion gap between the demand of the climate-vulnerable countries and the available resources.

That gap remains painfully obvious, but at least we have a clearer and more concrete number on it. This is why it is vital for Loss and Damage (L&D) to be more prominently featured in the agenda of climate COP31, especially after being left out of the formal SB64 agenda.

Developing countries, especially those who have seats in the FRLD Board, must lead the charge to ensure the glaring need for L&D finance, which has been formally recognized to be part of the new collective quantified goal of at least USD300 billion of public finance, as of COP30, would be properly addressed in Antalya, Turkiye.

Who's gonna make it

It must be noted that both the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and Adaptation Fund (AF) first approved projects during their respective 11th Board meetings. Then again, it only means the FRLD should not avoid replicating the same path.

We need to remember that the FRLD is intended to be an innovative fund that fills in the gaps seen in the multilateral finance landscape; this is not just about being designed to directly address loss and damage, but also avoid repeating the inefficiencies seen in other climate funds such as the GCF and the AF.

Then again, the issues linked with access did not just apply in this meeting to the BIM, but even the meeting itself.

Including the informal portion that happened on 7 July and rounding up the numbers, early estimates show there were around 16 hours of this meeting taking place behind closed doors, more than the 15 hours of being open to Active Observers or streamed online.

On one hand, while the FRLD is not designed to be a space for negotiations but rather an implementing entity, it is naïve to ever think those elements that shape the climate COPs do not apply to this space, the same elements that lead to decisions becoming compromises where nobody really wins, especially the climate and the vulnerable.

On another hand, developing countries should not be made to fight over little crumbs of funding there is. The most vulnerable communities, children and youth, women, Indigenous Peoples, and the like, should not be forced to scavenge for scraps of information on the discussions that shape their future, either.

We must hope that what transpired in B9 would set a precedent for how the FRLD would function moving forward. The next meeting takes place in December, which is when the Super El Niño is supposed to peak and around the time when strong storms hit the Philippines in recent years.

If climate action speaks louder than words, we are still waiting to hear from the FRLD.

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