Rich countries may never do their fair share to fight climate change until more of their citizens’ lives are on the line, says Gabon’s environment minister, Lee White. White is going to the United Nations climate conference in Egypt next week and wants to know what happened to the billions of dollars pledged by rich countries last year to help developing countries like his own. The Conference of the Parties, or COP, meets annually and is the global decision-making body established to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in the 1990s, and other climate agreements that have followed. At last year’s conference in Glasgow, developed countries – which contribute most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – pledged to spend US$100 billion to help developing countries that face most of the devastating effects of climate change.

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So far, developed countries have not lived up to their promise, giving away about $83 billion this year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. White says Gabon and other African nations have not seen their share of those funds. As he prepares for COP27, which will take place in Egypt from November 6 to 18, he says he will ask for a detailed accounting of this money. Here’s part of his conversation with As It Happens host Nil Köksal. I wonder how optimistic you are that you will see real action, real change, from the rich countries at this summit? What is going to happen in Egypt is that we have started a lot of work programs of two or three years [at COP26 last year] in Glasgow. Therefore, there are no major negotiating issues coming to the fore in Egypt. Therefore, there will be a reckoning as to whether or not the promises made were kept. Everyone’s a little worried we’ll find out they haven’t. And this risks spoiling the flavor of the COP. But time will tell. You sound skeptical. I’m partly skeptical… because I don’t really see it on the ground. If you just put hypothetically $83 billion across the 152 developing nations and do a simple math surface, you know, the size of the countries and roughly how much you would expect them to get, then I would expect Gabon to get maybe $200 million a year to fund our adaptation [and] to reward our mitigation efforts. And I really only see approx [$10 million]I think, the climate [financing] So yeah, it looks like we’re about 20 times off. Developing countries are raising many questions about the transparency of the $82 billion allocated by developed countries this year. Who gave how much? Where is? Where was it filed? And, specifically, where has it been spent? When I talk to my colleagues, ministers from the Congo, from Cameroon… they all share the same view as me that we don’t really see money hitting the ground. And if, once again, we are faced with false promises, it just changes the sentiment of the negotiations. It turns things sour and old frustrations come out. And then it becomes difficult to make compromises in the future. We’ve certainly seen heat waves, forest fires [and] floods in these developed nations — in case, you know, they weren’t convinced that climate change was having effects around the world. But what do you think it will take for rich countries to take action? I happened to take my son on vacation in the French Alps, and he got burned. It was shocking how many trees were dying and that shepherds would have to walk 14 hours with their sheep to find grass. So we’re starting to feel like we’re at the tipping point, where disaster after disaster hits us. So we see 22 million people starving in the Horn of Africa. We see Pakistan under water. We see forest fires and so on. But the sad reality is that until more people are directly affected by climate change in the developed and G20 countries—you know, it’s sad to say, until more people die in the countries responsible for the problem—things aren’t going to work. to change quickly enough, is my concern. What kind of leadership would you like to see from countries like Canada, for example? I would like to see climate treated the same way we treated COVID-19 or the same way we treated HIV/AIDS. People need to understand that it is an imminent threat. We keep saying climate change is something we’ll deal with later. I happen to be a minister who is a climate scientist. The longer we wait, the worse it will get and the harder it will be to pull things back from the fire. And there will come a point where the ecosystems will explode, the glaciers will melt, the ice caps will melt. And we are in danger of reaching a point where we really cannot predict the severity of what is going to happen. But we know it’s going to be very, very, very bad. A group of tree cutters is seen working on March 29, 2022, in the forest near the village of Bambidi in Gabon’s Ogoue province. (Steve Jordan/AFP/Getty Images) Your country receives about 60 percent of its government revenue from oil. What is Gabon doing to tackle climate change? We know that in the next 20 years, we will lose oil revenue because people will no longer buy oil. Gabon is a forest nation. We are 88 percent forested. Over the past five decades, we have had very strong environmental leadership… The current President Ali Bongo Ondimba was elected on a platform of sustainable development. We manage our forests. Even where we harvest timber, we harvest timber in a carbon-positive manner. The forest grows faster after we have harvested it. We offset all the oil we sell. We offset all our industrial emissions. And net we absorb just over 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, which is around a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions. Gabon is actually one of the best in class when it comes to fighting climate change. We have achieved the Paris goal of carbon neutrality and have gone far beyond it. And we keep trying and doing better. Back to the summit you are going to attend. You know, there is already criticism. Young climate activist Greta Thunberg is among those criticizing COP27. He goes so far as to call it “greenwashing” and says he won’t be attending. And I wonder why it is important for you to be there? The climate negotiation in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the only space we have to talk about these issues and make collective decisions across all UN members on how to fight it. So, like it or hate it, it’s the only place where we can make these agreements and, you know, hopefully encourage countries to keep their commitments. I have been a negotiator for 15 years. I find it an incredibly frustrating process to come to a consensus with almost 200 nations with very different views. It is very difficult in many subjects. So I completely understand the frustration of the young activists who are going to bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change, they’re going to have to, you know, clean up the mess that our generation has created. But if you leave your chair empty … if you’re not there to keep pushing, then we’re definitely not going to find solutions.