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What left many grumbling at the 26th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP26) held in November in Glasgow was rich countries like the United States and those in the European Union striking down the Glasgow Loss and Damage Facility, a body created to address how to compensate developing countries for climate change-related losses and damages. Wealthy countries have been found to be most responsible for causing the climate crisis and face litigation as well as ensuing liabilities and payouts. 

But the demand to recognize loss and damage remains alive. A good indication being many climate-vulnerable developing countries have referenced loss and damage in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries are required to submit NDCs to detail their national action to address global climate change, including steps to adapt to a changing climate and the form of financial assistance needed to undertake such action. 

Small-Income and Developing Countries Hard Hit

A report published in October, 2021 found one-third of the 250 NDCs that were analyzed explicitly mentioned loss and damage. Most were from small-island developing states and least developed countries in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean. The report was supported by the European Research Council’s Politics of Climate Change Loss and Damage (CCLAD) project. 

“NDCs are political documents and not just technical submissions [under the Paris Agreement],” said Elisa Calliari, a co-author of the report. 

Developed countries tend to focus on mitigation action, like the deployment of renewable energy. But that hasn’t been the case for the majority of the world’s states.

“Developing countries have pushed hard for the inclusion of adaptation in NDCs because, for them, this is more of a priority than mitigation,” Calliari pointed out. “So you can see the politics.”

For people living in an island nation like Sri Lanka, “key loss and damage impacts are felt in food systems and other vulnerable sectors, like the coastal and marine sector and water resources. These impacts have already resulted in migration interlinked with or induced by climate change among vulnerable communities,” said Vositha Wijenayake, executive director of the SLYCAN Trust, a non-profit think tank working in Asia, Africa and Europe. Its work focuses on climate change, biodiversity and ecosystems, sustainable development, and social justice. 

Sri Lanka is classified as a lower-middle income/developing country. Given that it is also an island, its exposure to climate-related risks is high. These two factors make it extremely vulnerable to climate impacts and the ability to withstand them.

So, Wijenayake added, it is important for countries most vulnerable to climate change that loss and damage is a “key component” in addressing climate change processes, both negotiations and climate action. And this is why Sri Lanka was among the first countries to have a separate section allocated to loss and damage commitments included in its first NDCs submitted in September 2016. Building on this, the updated NDC of Sri Lanka submitted last July includes a separate section on loss and damage.

Interestingly, the report says upper-income countries like Costa Rica, Chile and Uruguay also have cited loss and damage in their NDCs. 

And outside of NDCs, many developing countries have explicitly stated loss- and damage-related demands. For instance, consider India’s environment ministry laying out ahead of COP26, “There should be a compensation for expenses incurred, and it should be borne by developed nations.”

How to Fund Loss and Damage

A question that usually rears its head with respect to addressing loss and damage is how to “operationalize” it, or what processes and institutions could be set up at the global and national levels to address loss and damage. 

“[One way would be] to look at NDCs for a bottom-up approach to understand how countries themselves are looking at loss and damage,” Calliari said. 

Of the NDCs that explicitly mention loss and damage, around half specify loss- and damage-related responses and initiatives like data gathering, analysis and assessment, and institutional capacities to address loss and damage. For example, Sri Lanka’s NDC has a whole section on loss and damage. It mentions strengthening its weather and climate forecasting systems, plus improving data management to record loss and damage. Meanwhile, Honduras’ NDC puts forth a “gender-responsive agricultural insurance mechanism for loss and damage.”

Wijenayake also stressed “inclusive and participatory processes,” in which the voices of those vulnerable to climate change are taken into account in the national and international policy-making processes. As is “ground-level implementation,” she added. 

And so, country-specific NDCs could potentially be a good starting point to determine how to put mechanisms in place to address loss and damage on a global scale. 

Getting Polluting Countries to Pay

The other gap that exists today is how finance can be mobilized to fund efforts that compensate for climate change-related loss and damage. A recent study by the Stockholm Environment Institute offers potential solutions. 

The researchers propose finance should be provided based on the following:

• Solidarity,
• “polluter pays” principle that is based on “historical responsibility,” and 
• the established notion of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (or CBDR-RC, for short) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 

CBDR-RC means that while climate change is a shared concern, rich countries with a history of emitting carbon—like the United States and those in Europe—have a greater responsibility to take climate action than the poorer countries.  

The “polluter pays” principle has only been used to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for environmental destruction. It implies more strict liabilities than “historical responsibilities,” which outlines broad principles based on past emissions. 

The authors stress a combined approach that deploys the principles of solidarity, polluter pays and historical responsibility, as well as using the framework of CBDR-RC, to finance loss and damage. 

A strictly liability-based approach would be “politically infeasible and communities cannot wait for years to prove the liability,” said Zoha Shawoo, an associate scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute as well as one of the authors of the SEI report. 

The research team also looked at methods of recovery and rehabilitation that communities would need after financing efforts to cover losses and damages. Those efforts can include planning the relocation of communities, assisting with migration and providing affected people with alternative livelihoods. Here, too, NDCs could help with granular details like national-level entities and processes that could assist local communities with issues like displacement and loss of livelihood. 

Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India. She had reported for Toward Freedom from COP26 in Glasgow.

On May 6 and 7, Instagram users in India noticed that some of their posts were starting to vanish. Gone were their COVID-19-related posts that demanded improved conditions for overworked crematorium workers, publicized volunteer-led relief efforts, and linked coronavirus deaths in the country to “abject callousness” of the government. Stranger still was the removal of private chats on the matter.

“There is a growing trend of internet shutdowns, takedown of social media content, particularly around political speech in India over the last few years,” said Vidushi Marda, global AI research and advocacy lead at ARTICLE 19, an international freedom of expression organization that has been tracking the deleted content.

In India right now, whether or not people have access to COVID-19 information on social media is a matter of life and death. Such censorship, however, is not unique to the country. Over the past month, activists and researchers have also collected numerous examples of suppressed content related to unrest in Palestine and Colombia, as well as posts related to the National Day of Awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in the U.S. and Canada.

On May 7, Instagram said that “this is a widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic” and that the issue had been “fixed.”

But the following day, the company acknowledged that there were issues with posts relating to unrest in Colombia and Palestine.

“We are so sorry this happened,” Instagram noted in a statement. “Especially to those in Colombia, East Jerusalem, and Indigenous communities who felt this was an intentional suppression of their voices and stories — that was not our intent whatsoever.”

But Instagram failed to acknowledge reports of censorship in India.

A representative of Facebook, which owns Instagram, wrote in response to questions about why dissent in India, Colombia, and Palestine seemed to have been disproportionately impacted: “This was a widespread global technical issue that affected users around the world, regardless of the topic of their Stories. We fixed it as fast as we could so users around the world could continue expressing themselves and connecting with each other through Stories.”

Despite the company’s claims that the takedowns were automatic and universal, Marda said there was “overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent.”

In India, she noted that ARTICLE 19 observed “significant overlap between posts about activism, COVID-19 relief and government critique.” All of this, she said, points to “a significantly larger problem than just a single automation tool,” and noted “the opacity of content moderation practices” means that there are gaps in accountability.

Such digital suppression isn’t simply a matter of being able to speak freely. In each of these countries, thanks to government failures and limited media coverage, people have come to rely on social media to share information, track resources, and protect themselves from violence.

Part of the problem is automated content moderation, which uses machine learning to filter content. The systems are blunt instruments that often misunderstand context and remove too much or too little content, noted a report by the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. These developments, adds the report, can negatively impact minority groups because these tools are often trained on English-language datasets, so they have trouble properly parsing dialects and rarely-used languages.

“[There is] overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent,” said Marda. “[This is] precisely why… human rights organizations and defenders around the world have pointed to the dangers of automated content moderation for years.”

 

India’s History Of Digital Censorship

Because of the Indian government’s monumental failure in tackling the coronavirus, people in the country have come to rely on social media to seek and provide COVID-related help like oxygen supplies and vaccinations. Many people have also used social media to collate lists of supplies into a larger, searchable database.

Silicon Valley-driven censorship in India, therefore, has become a matter of survival, despite the fact that Instagram has yet to acknowledge it.

“Despite documented instances of censorship [in India] and Instagram users highlighting them very prominently, there was a complete lack of recognition [by Instagram] of what’s happening in India,” said Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based organization that seeks to ensure that technology respects fundamental rights.

Digital suppression in the country isn’t new, despite the fact that the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression.

In 2020, India had the highest number of government-instigated internet shutdowns in the world. The digital crackdowns were one of the reasons Reporters Without Borders recently ranked India 142 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedoms.

On April 28, Facebook temporarily hid posts critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that included the hashtag #ResignModi for “violating its community standards.” A Facebook spokesperson later said that the posts were hidden “by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to.”

“Silicon Valley platforms have a very natural interest in keeping governments happy in the regions that they operate,” Gupta said, pointing to the fact that India is Facebook’s biggest market.

The lack of institutionalized free speech protections is further compounded by laws and regulations in India that allow the Ministry of Electronics and Information to not disclose censorship orders sent to social media companies, said Gupta.

Users are therefore often given no official explanation why their posts were suppressed.

 

Content Moderation In Colombia

There have also been numerous reports of censorship related to ongoing protests in Colombia over proposed tax increases and the resulting police crackdowns.

“We identified a specific problem with Instagram,” said Carolina Botero Cabrera, a researcher with Karisma, a Bogotá based civil society organization that works on technology and human rights. “We have over 1,000 reports of censorship, around 90 percent of it was by Instagram and the content was overwhelmingly about the [ongoing] protests,” she added.

Deleted posts reportedly related to the national unrest, unemployment numbers in the country, and the death of a protester.

For Colombia, a country with a long-lasting civil war, such automated content moderation is all the more contentious because journalists and human rights activists often find that their content is removed, their reach is diminished, or their accounts are blocked because their content is deemed too violent.

Jesus Abad Colorado, an experienced Colombian photojournalist, recently had his Twitter account blocked after he posted photographs of an armed dispute in the Chocó Department in Western Colombia. A few days later, when an independent media outlet livestreamed an interview with Colorado about the dispute, their account was blocked, too.

Another challenge, said Botero, is that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People’s Army (FARC), the longtime leftist guerilla group that disarmed and became a political party in 2017, “was flagged as a terrorist organization [by social media companies at the time] even though they were in peace negotiations.”

The peace process spanned about four years, culminating in a peace agreement in 2016. “Any research about the peace process will have to deal with important problems to [understand] FARC’s position, actions, and voice,” said Botero, noting that blocked social media accounts and deleted content hamper documentation of the process.

 

Suppressing Palestinian Voices

As tensions escalated in Israel and Palestine, digital suppression in the region also appeared to increase.

“We have over 100 reports of censorship on Instagram,” said Alison Carmel Ramer, a researcher at 7amleh, a Haifa-based digital rights organization based in Haifa, Israel.

Ramer’s research and other reports found that most of the censored content was related to Israeli forces storming Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. Other censored content was related to the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Muslim, a media publication, also documented blocks on Instagram livestreams related to Palestine.

According to ِRamer, Facebook told 7amleh that a majority of the Instagram takedowns were mistakes because they did not violate community standards and that they have restored the content.

“This means there is a problem in the way content is moderated,” said Ramer. “Why is content which is not against community standards being taken down? [Facebook] also did not tell users under which policy the content was taken down.”

In general, Palestinian content is “over-moderated” Ramer added, noting posts are often suppressed either because they are considered hate speech, or the posts appear to be connected to terrorist organizations. Many Palestinian leaders are designed as terrorists by the United States, meaning Facebook censors content related to them. Ramer also explained how hate speech in the region written in Hebrew is not censored to the same extent as hate speech in Arabic.

A March 2021 report by 7amleh which analysed 574,000 social media conversations in 2020 showed that one out of every 10 Israeli posts about Palestinians and Arabs contained violent speech, a 16 percent increase compared to 2019. “We have sent reports like this one to Facebook for several years and every year, [but] we find that this content just remains online,” Ramer said, adding that Facebook has not informed them of what, if any, actions it intends to take.

A recent report in The Intercept also noted how Facebook censors the word “Zionist.”

“Zionism is a political ideology,” Ramer said. “Political speech must be protected. Words like ‘Zionist’ and ‘shahid’ [martyr in Arabic] should be protected.” Censorship in the region is especially concerning because of the longstanding lack of transparency around Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, political activist Noam Chomsky told The Daily Poster.

“Israel’s brutal repression of Palestinians for many years, with strong support from the U.S. particularly, is a shocking crime in itself and has ominous international repercussions as well,” said Chomsky. “There have been extensive efforts to block efforts to bring the facts and their significance to the general public. These efforts amount to direct participation in the crimes.”

When asked about social media companies’ ability to freely censor content, Chomsky replied, “Their enormous power should not be tolerated.”

 

The Path Ahead

At ARTICLE 19, Marda said that in order to align itself with international human rights standards, Facebook “must publicly and transparently acknowledge the reasons for recent takedowns” and “provide information for the substantive and legal reasons for takedown.”

Marda added that Facebook should also “restore all blocked content” and “publicly commit to not bowing to governmental or judicial pressure that requires it to act in violation of international human rights standards and jurisdiction-specific standards on freedom of expression.”

This article was originally published in The Daily Poster.

Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.

“Don’t Look Up” uses satire to magnify the outrageous responses of fictional U.S. politicians, media, corporations and the population to a fictional comet that is about to collide with Earth and wipe out all life. But the film’s depiction isn’t too far from reality, considering how the real-life U.S. government has failed to address climate change, which could cost all of us our lives.

Leonardo DiCaprio effectively plays astronomist “Dr. Randall Mindy,” mentoring younger female doctoral student “Kate Dibiasky,” played by Jennifer Lawrence. Mindy is portrayed as a typically dull and bland scientist type, with a dull and bland wife and family life. This reflects the stereotype of scientists being boring and uninteresting, and helps to set up for the drastic change Mindy undergoes later in the film when he is exposed to the limelight.

Dibiasky on the other hand is the stereotypical hip, loner Geek Girl, rapping along with Wu Tang Clan’s “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin’ Ta F’ Wit,” while she scours the stars in her school’s observatory and discovers the comet. But, as brilliant as she is, Dibiasky is portrayed as socially awkward and unsophisticated, with a demeanor that is actually direct, especially considering the circumstances, but is characterized as sullen and snarky, and used against her later in the film.

As the scientists’ discovery is brought to the attention of the president of the United States, played with wacky deviousness by Meryl Streep, their warnings are dismissed and spun in ridiculous ways. But when we consider how real-life politicians approach policy—and even science—not from a people-centered approach, but with a primary focus on polling and elections, the scenes depicting the president with her advisors and cabinet members aren’t so ridiculous after all.

The film also takes a very pointed jab at the media; vapid morning talk shows, in particular. Even those that are allegedly political, with their focus on keeping the banter and topics light, rather than focusing on whatever existential crisis humanity is facing, and there are lots of them, but in this case the impending extinction-level collision of a comet with Earth. But print media is not spared, as the lack of journalistic integrity is critiqued when a major print newspaper also goes with the narrative that polls well, rather than the truth of the story leaked to them that the talk news shows and the government ignored.

The stereotype of the sex-crazed, airhead talk-show personality is played boozily by Cate Blanchette, throwing herself at the (arguably) sexy male scientist, Mindy, while insisting that the serious Dibiasky never return to the show. But, in truth, too many female television personalities do play the role of the pretty, bleached-blond giggler anchoring “news” shows that millions watch every day, without delivering an ounce of real, truthful news about any of the issues that impact those people’s lives. And the film presents the misinformation those regular people receive from politicians and the media effectively in rabid “Don’t Look Up” advocates convinced that the comet is a tool being used by “them” to make people live in fear.

Meanwhile, Tyler Perry portrays Blanchette’s male co-anchor. He plays just as much of an airhead as his female colleague, refusing to deal with the seriousness of the comet, but he does so with a strain of vindictiveness as he makes jokes about the comet destroying his ex-wife’s house. I think there’s something to be said for the lengths some Black people will go to maintain the status quo, even when the lives of others are at stake and they know it. Particularly in the media.

Even citizen activism is touched on in the movie, with the fervent efforts to educate and inform people are drowned out by powerful politicians, the media and the military. And even celebrity advocacy is skewered for the feel-good-but-oftentimes-vanity project that it usually is.

Corporations are not spared in this pointed satire, as a creepy/robotic/absentminded professor/evil genius-like tech company CEO with a cult-like following named Peter Isherwell—played by English actor Mark Rylance—floats a truly diabolical idea to the president on how to deal with the comet. Isherwell’s company, BASH Cellular, is an obvious portrayal of the tech behemoths Apple, Google and Facebook have become. BASH is so ubiquitous, the fictional tech company is able to detect people’s moods and present them with visual content to help them feel better. That isn’t out of the realm of reality, because who doesn’t enjoy a great cat video right now? I sure do. But that the government capitulated to him isn’t ridiculous at all in light of the current corporate control of the real-life U.S. government, and viewers should not miss the film’s condemnation of the illogical, insane, life-threatening capitalist greed in the whole plan. What people may miss is the implied imperialism when the fictional U.S. government breaks a treaty with China, India and Russia, and the coincidental (not at all) mysterious (not at all) disaster that befalls the aforementioned countries’ plan.

It is true that the film is co-written by David Sirota, former-Clintonite-turned-progressive. But Sirota and his crew are spot on with much of the political commentary. Where it misses is the film is very… Eurocentric, with only a lone Indigenous dancer near the end, which might signify the people nobody listened to. But I’m not quite sure. That scene honestly seemed like an afterthought. 

Otherwise, “Don’t Look Up” is a funny film because the responses of the fictional politicians, media figures and regular folks are so utterly and breathtakingly ridiculous and portrayed so well by the cast. But I think it also is a horror movie because we know every depiction of the real-life people and institutions those actors play is absolutely true.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary.”