Oh, when will they ever learn?

Days after millions of people took to the streets in cities across the world in September to demand concrete action against climate change, 125 world leaders attended a meeting called by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and re-affirmed their commitments to deal with the global problem through a new global agreement. At the Berlin climate finance conference two months later, the GCF secured $9 billion in commitments from the advanced countries. But the amount is just a fraction of the $50 billion they should have donated by now.

And therein lies the problem. The fight against climate change has been lost in calculations, calculations of money, calculations of which country or organization can make how much from the climate crisis. Promises are made only to be broken. The world, especially the advanced world, vowed to not let the Kyoto Protocol expire without a representative successive treaty in 2012. Lest it be forgotten, the Kyoto Protocol was the only binding climate deal the world has seen. Going by past records, the $100 billion promised by the advanced countries to the GCF by 2020 is unlikely to become reality.

If the big players are only interested (or disinterested) in the deals because of the money saved or to be earned, here's some news for them: more than 6,000 major climate and water disasters since 1992 have caused a loss of $1.6 trillion (even if they may not interested in the more than 600,000 lives lost). The figures come from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Belgium, an advanced economy, which has also revealed that from 1983 to 1992 the world averaged 147 climate and water disasters each year, and in the past 10 years that number has increased to an average of 306 a year.

As long as the world does not realize the fight against climate change is not (and should not be) only about money but about saving the planet, the only inhabitable planet we know, conferences like the one in Lima will not be the beginning of a concerted international effort to take the bull by the horns.

We will have to wait until Dec 12 to see whether the truth has sunk in.

The author is a senior editor with China Daily. oprana@hotmail.com