Zeus: COP27 battle lines drawn over climate compensation fund

Poor countries point toward debt relief, which could roil markets.

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A man carries relief items along the only remaining road after devastating flooding in Pakistan in September. EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid/Abdul Majeed/flickr.

(David Callaway is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is the former president of the World Editors Forum, Editor-in-Chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc.)

SAN FRANCISCO (Callaway Climate Insights) — The global banking industry’s fall meetings in Washington D.C., like the spring ones, are typically subdued affairs. Bankers aren’t known for raising the roof, former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn excepted.

But often in times of great financial turbulence, journalists can come away with market-driving headlines as usually obscure monetary leaders use their twice-annual pulpits to break news. Such was the case this week when the former president of the Maldives, Mohammad Nasheed, fired a missile at the upcoming COP27 climate summit in Egypt in three weeks.

Faced with the prospects that war, energy crises, and rampant inflation this year will make it difficult to coerce wealthy nations into developing a fund to help poorer ones fight global warming, Nasheed said 20 small countries were considering withholding payments on as much as $685 billion in government debts.