The UK’s international development minister, Andrew Mitchell, has played down the prospects of imposing a levy on frequent flyers to help fund the rescue and rehabilitation of poor countries stricken by climate disaster.
A small charge on airline tickets is one of several ideas floated by developing countries to provide cash for the loss and damage fund.
The fund was set up at the Cop28 UN climate summit but is grossly under-resourced, with only about $700m having been pledged so far. The needs of developing countries are likely to reach hundreds of billions a year, and this is unlikely to be met only from the public purses of developed countries, so most countries agree that new sources of funding must be found.
An airline levy is one of the frontrunners, but Mitchell indicated it could struggle to gain support from the British government. He told the Guardian at Cop28 that this was not an official position but his own view. However, Rishi Sunak has previously acted to reduce air passenger duty in the UK, so it would be little surprise if he vetoed other levies on flying.
The frequent flyer levy was proposed last year by the V20 group of the world’s most vulnerable countries, and has broad support among many developed and developing countries. Eamon Ryan, the Irish environment minister who is charged with examining innovative sources of finance for the EU, said: “There are various principles behind it that make sense: ‘polluter pays’ is a basic principle, and there’s equity to it. It’s the wealthier people in the world who fly.”
He said the tax need not be large: a small levy on each of the hundreds of millions of international flight tickets sold each year would raise billions, and the EU was already looking at the issue of greenhouse gas emissions from aviation. “It doesn’t have to be punitive,” he told the Guardian in a separate interview at the climate conference.
Other innovative sources of finance under consideration include a possible carbon levy on shipping. Steps have already been taken at the International Maritime Organization to put this into practice, after a softening this year of previously strong opposition from the shipping industry and some countries with large fleets.
Taxes on the profits of fossil fuel companies are another possibility, favoured by Gordon Brown, the former prime minister. Mitchell said that the UK was already levying its own windfall tax on oil and gas producers, though its proceeds are not linked to climate funds.
Ryan said there was no single answer to raising cash for the loss and damage fund, and other forms of climate finance, but that a “mosaic” approach would be needed. “I hope there is language in the text [the final outcome from Cop28] that will allow us to do that,” he said. “We need to do it, not wait for two years of negotiations and then press the green button. It’s already starting to happen, we need to accelerate by giving a signal here [in Dubai].”
Mitchell said getting more “non-traditional” donors to contribute to the loss and damage fund was also essential. In the past, only long industrialised countries such as the UK, the US and the EU were expected to pay for climate finance in the most vulnerable countries. But with the new loss and damage fund, all countries with the means are “encouraged” by the text to contribute.
Only the United Arab Emirates, the host country of Cop28, has so far contributed, however, with $100m. Saudi Arabia, despite its oil wealth and its immense offers of cash to footballers, has kept its purse strings tight, and China’s climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, told journalists at the weekend that it was already helping developing nations through its own initiatives, indicating that it was unlikely to make a contribution to the loss and damage fund.
Michell said the UAE’s donation was what had prompted the UK’s £60m contribution, which came from the government’s existing climate aid budget of £11.6bn by 2025.
“On loss and damage, we want different donors, not just traditional donors – UAE is one such donor, and so that opened our coffers. But we also want new and imaginative ways of raising funding. Because otherwise, we’re just plundering the same pot,” he said.
Mitchell said the UK was also backing reforms to the international financial systems that would benefit developing countries, including new rules for the World Bank to ease its low-cost lending for climate projects in poor countries. “Britain is having an impact here [at Cop28], but we have lost some of our leadership DNA in recent years. And we need to try and win it back,” he conceded.
