In recent days, as scientists debated climate data and final arrangements of the last part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) sixth assessment report (AR6), which was released on Monday (20), government negotiators were jockeying to decide which groups and regions should be defined as particularly vulnerable to climate change.

According to a report from the IISD think-tank meeting, Tanzania and Timor-Leste have called for the world's poorest countries, known as least developed countries (LDCs) in UN international negotiations, to be added to a list of communities impacted by the climate crisis.

The document further says that during the talks, some African countries and small island developing states (SIDs) were almost excluded from a section on vulnerabilities in AR6 and replaced with a reference to "developing and least developed countries."

At the end of the debates, the synthesis report listed representatives from Africa, SIDs, LDCs, Central and South America, Asia and the Arctic as particularly vulnerable.

There are several reasons why a country wants to be labeled as vulnerable, one of them is better access to climate finance, as was clear during the discussions of the last UN climate summit, COP27, held in Egypt, when it was approved the creation of a fund of loss and damage precisely for those most fragile when it comes to climate change.

But what makes some places more vulnerable than others are not just physical factors, such as sea level rise and extreme weather events, but also social factors such as poverty and infrastructure conditions.

"It seems that governments fear that if their country is not mentioned, they may receive less support (e.g. global adaptation funds)," Jörn Birkmann, who researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and was the lead author coordinating one of the IPCC's underlying reports, told Climate Home.

For the expert, it is still difficult to name specific global regions that are more vulnerable than others and the IPCC synthesis report mentions some regions, but "it seems to be much easier for governments to agree on generic phrases, rather than pointing to areas or countries where such deficits are evident."

Source: Um só Planeta