Malik Amin Aslam Khan, former Pakistani Minister for Climate Change (pictured in photo), has sent an open letter to the Board of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (IC-VCM) calling for the proposed Share of Proceeds (SoP) as a Core Carbon Principle (CCP) of the VCM to also include a Loss & Damage (L&D) Response component. He reiterates his support for letters from AOSIS and the least developed countries (LDCs) and from the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), the LDC Group, and the West African Alliance on Carbon Markets and Climate Finance sent in June 2022 calling for the inclusion of SoP for Adaptation (SoPA) in the CCPs.
Aslam Khan refers to recent changes in the international funding landscape with the historic decision taken in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, in December 2022 to establish a L&D Response Fund under the Paris Agreement which “can be seen as the most important climate advance since the Paris Agreement”.
Mentioning the recent devastating floods in Pakistan, which displaced 33 million people and damaged if not destroyed thousands of hospitals and miles of roads, he reiterates the urgency of addressing L&D and cites an opinion piece he co-authored with ecbi Director Benito Müller, Time to Respond!, which was published on the OCP website and the news aggregator website unclimatesummit.org.
In his letter, Aslam Khan stresses the importance of harnessing innovative funding sources for the L&D Response Fund, specifically calling to add, to the CCPs, a ‘dual-purpose’ SoP for adaptation and L&D Response of at least 5%. Through such a SoP, the VCM would not only align itself with the Article 6.4 Mechanism under the Paris Agreement, but “it would be ahead of the curve, in the progressive vanguard of climate solidarity finance”.
Efforts to include SoP in the CCPs have been ongoing although they have now taken on the addition of a proposed SoP for L&D following the COP27 decision. In March 2022, ecbi and Oxford Climate Policy published a Discussion Note on a SoPA in the VCM. In October 2022, the Climate Vulnerable Forum published a blog post by Saleemul Huq, Chair of the CVF Expert Advisory Group and Head of the ecbi Training and Support Programme, titled Voluntary Carbon Markets’ Credibility in Question Over Support for Adaptation. OCP/ecbi provided input to the IC-VCM consultation on CCPs, calling for inclusion of a SoP. Launched in July 2022, the public consultation ran for 60 days. Several July 2022 news articles highlighted the SoP as a CCP of the VCM, including those published on the websites of Thomas Reuters Foundation (In carbon markets we trust? New global guidance aims to stop greenwashing) and Climate Home News (Make polluters for climate adaptation, voluntary carbon market body proposes).
