As you probably know, the big win at the last climate jamboree (COP27 in Egypt) was the establishment of the Loss & Damage facility. And a big win it was! The question, now, is how we’re going to provision that facility, how we’re going to fund the fund.
The principle of this website is transitional justice — how to provide the resources needed to actually achieve the climate transition. In the next year, we’ll have a lot to say about this, and about Loss & Damage finance in particular, but today, as I dig out my email, I just want to quote a particularly pithy summary of the road forward, one written by the inestimable Lidy Nacpil, together with Thuli Makama, both of whom hail from the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development. It’s called Rich nations can afford to pay their fair share to fix global crises and here’s their summary of the menu, as it stood just after the COP.
The first [option] is making fossil fuel companies pay. While many households were pushed into poverty this year, oil and gas companies made record profits and governments continued to subsidise them. Ending fossil fuel subsidies would raise at least $600 billion a year, and a 10% tax hike on oil and gas production about $400 billion in 2022. Along these lines, the EU and UK among others have introduced windfall taxes on oil and gas profits, and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and small island governments are calling for part of these to be levied toward the loss and damage fund.
There is also momentum to shift a particularly influential form of fossil subsidy – international public finance – towards renewable energy instead. At COP26, 39 countries and institutions promised to end their $28 billion a year in international finance for fossil fuels by the end of 2022. While Germany, Canada, the U.S. and Italy have yet to meet this pending deadline, a growing group of countries has.
Second, a small tax on extreme wealth would raise $2.5 trillion a year, and related proposals to crack down on tax dodging would significantly bolster this. Because the world’s richest 1% have caused 23% of greenhouse gas emissions growth since 1990, these measures are also needed to reach climate targets. In a push that mirrored the loss and damage win, last week African countries secured a key step towards these reforms by passing a resolution for the U.N. to hold its own intergovernmental talks on tax rules rather than them remaining the sole domain of the OECD.
Calls to cancel Global South countries’ sovereign debts – incurred through our neo-colonial global financial system – predate the climate crisis but are intensifying with it. Campaigners brought these asks to COP27, pointing out that low-income countries are forced to pay wealthier countries the initial $100 billion a year they have been promised in climate finance many times over in debt service payments.
The economic volatility of the last few years has compounded debts in many countries, preventing public spending on basic needs, let alone climate action. In response, some governments and agencies are finally making serious debt proposals like cancelling $100 billion a year for the next decade.
Finally, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s popular Bridgetown Agenda to tackle debt and climate has components of many these proposals, as well as an ask for the International Monetary Fund to inject at least $650-billion worth of reserve assets into struggling economies annually through Special Drawing Rights.
Together, these modest proposals add up to well over $3.7 trillion a year. More ambitious versions, closer to the scale of the Global North’s ongoing and historical debts to the rest of the world, could free up even more. We have always had the money for a liveable future where no one must choose between heating and eating, or transport and shelter – what may finally be arriving is the political impetus for the governments most responsible for today’s global crises to pay up.