Short Story: Loss and Damage

Naderev ‘Yeb’ Sano does not seem to be a big man. He does not stand out from the crowd of blazer wearing men and women. His face is small, bespectacled and his hair neatly combed to the side. And yet when his voice is first heard, there is a quiet rhythm and verve to it that is not dwarfed by the vast, operatic milieu of Warsaw’s Stadion Narodowy, the venue of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also called Conference of Parties (COP) 19. Sano is the lead negotiator for the Philippines at the conference. ‘My country is being tested by this hell-storm called Super Typhoon Haiyan’ he begins, looking at the stage, where about half a dozen people sit stiffly, surrounded by papers, files, laptops and other artifacts and paraphernalia of modern diplomacy. He’s continuing: ‘....but haiyan left a trail of massive destruction that is unprecedented, unthinkable and horrific.’ Presently he looks down at the paper and something cracks through him, as if he were glass, he is no longer looking at the people on the stage. He looks down instead and continues ‘and the devastation...’ his voice trails off. We see he’s crying. We see him closing his eyes to stem the flow of tears, his slow, private grief that is all the more wrenching for what it conceals. His country lies ravaged, its cities and villages totaled, its people dead or dying, communications cut off and plunged into darkness by the typhoon. His tears feel like the remnant of a national torment. And so simple and almost selfish his confession: that he finds renewed strength that comes from the personal relief of his brother being alive. Yet when he says, “I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves’, all the despair and bere...

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...m to do a lot more. The United States, Australia, Norway, Japan and their allies continue to insist that loss and damage must be a part of the adaptation mechanism. They hold that the Green Climate Fund (GCF), that is led by several developed nations, must get the required investment in order that vulnerable countries be able to meet adaptation needs. The holy grail in this context - a draft bill -is drawn up. There is chaos. A hundred different objections go up, even though that draft is the result of all the discussions to-date. Somebody says the phrase ‘under the convention’ is unacceptable.The meeting is broken up for 15 minutes to discuss if the word ‘under’ is appropriate. The US is irritated that the Kyoto Protocol is being mentioned. The EU says, and it could have been speaking a larger truth, ‘it’s getting hot and we are uncomfortably close to each other’.