Opinion | Asia can’t afford to wait for the US to wake up to its climate duty

President Donald Trump’s second term has been a wrecking ball for US climate policy – ripping the country out of the Paris Agreement, gutting climate science funding and abandoning global clean energy commitments. Fossil fuels are back at the centre of power, while international climate efforts scramble to fill the void left by a retreating America.

Scientists flee to Europe, funding dries up for energy transitions and the United States, once a key player in climate diplomacy, now cedes leadership to China. The damage is swift, deliberate and devastating – just as the planet’s window for climate action narrows.

For decades, the US has talked a big game on climate – pledging action, signing agreements, making promises. But when the moment came to lead, it always blinked. It dodged the Kyoto Protocol, watered down the Paris Agreement and kept the fossil fuel spigot wide open. Now, with Trump’s second term, the pretence is gone. America had chance after chance to lead. Instead, it has chosen, time and again, to be the deadweight dragging the world down.

Nowhere is this failure more blatant than in the US decision to walk away from the loss and damage fund, an agreement aimed at providing assistance to developing countries. For climate-vulnerable nations in Asia where the climate crisis isn’t a distant threat but a daily reality, this isn’t just another broken promise – it’s a punch to the gut.

Asia accounts for over 60 per cent of the world’s population and is home to some of its most vulnerable communities. From Bangladesh’s sinking deltas to Vietnam’s vanishing coastlines, from Pakistan’s catastrophic floods to the Philippines’ supercharged typhoons, communities everywhere are bearing the brunt of climate-induced disasters they did little to cause.

Established at the Cop28 UN climate conference, the loss and damage fund wasn’t just meant to provide a modicum of relief for these communities. It was a hard-won victory, a recognition that more than just thoughts and prayers, frontline nations deserve actual resources to recover from the devastation that fossil-fuelled economies have inflicted upon them.