Global rights defender Amnesty International says Malawi and Mozambique should be compensated for loss and damage caused by Tropical Cyclone Freddy.

AI said this in a statement posted on its website, in reaction to the cyclone that has left 326 dead, and over 183 000 displaced in the Southern Region of Malawi as of Thursday.

The statement by AI east and southern Africa director Tigere Chagutah says Malawi and Mozambique are facing the full force of storms that are intensifying due to global warming driven mostly by carbon emissions from world’s richest nations.

“The affected countries must also be compensated for loss and damage caused by the cyclone. Mozambique and Malawi are among the countries least responsible for climate change,” reads the statement.

The report further asks the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) and the international community to mobilise the necessary resources to aid rescue efforts.

It says the focus must be on saving lives and providing relief in compliance with human rights standards for those that have lost their homes and livelihoods.

Last year, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UN CCC) CoP27 agreed to provide a loss and damage funding for vulnerable countries hit hard by climate disasters.

In an interview on Thursday, Civil Society Network on Climate Change national coordinator Julius Ngoma said the call is justified from the principle of climate justice on how developed countries have been in the forefront emitting a lot of greenhouse gasses causing global warming and climate change.

“Moving forward, we expect a lot of climate-related events to be happening across the globe which means a lot of damages and losses that will be incurred if we will not be mitigating,” he said.

Ngoma said the issue of reparations and compensation comes in because these are not natural events, but man-made.

“That reparations and compensation would be in the spirit of addressing loss and damage; then we need financing from those countries to be coming to countries such as Malawi to help us address the impact of climate-related events,” he said.

He said at the CoP27 engagements, the developed countries accepted responsibility because they cause climate change “but they were not willing to accept responsibility to be paying compensation”.

“But slowly we have seen under UN CCC last meeting at CoP27, there was an agreement that there has to be an establishment of loss and damage financing arrangement,” said Ngoma

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