Big polluters owe Global South $5 trillion a year

The superstorms, floods, and heat waves of 2024 have been deadly for people and communities worldwide. Losses and damages have been especially heavy for us in the Global South, who are most endangered by the climate crisis despite contributing the least to global emissions.

We urge the world’s leading historical emitters to pay the Global South at least $5 trillion a year in climate finance as part of the reparations for the chaos they’ve unleashed on the world’s most vulnerable people.

The year 2024 has been a landmark year for the climate crisis. For the first time, the average global temperature stayed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for 12 months in a row. In the Philippines, extreme heat reached 47 degrees Celsius in April, prompting school closures and the collapse of power grids. In southern Pakistan, 568 dead bodies were found over six days amid a heatwave in June. Most recently, catastrophic floods in Bangladesh have left 1.24 million families stranded without access to shelter, food, and clean water.

Global North nations are responsible for 50 percent of all planet-warming greenhouse gasses in the earth’s atmosphere despite making up only 12 percent of the global population. For centuries, industrialization via fossil fuels has enriched these nations, their elites, and their corporations while condemning the people of the Global South to displacement and dispossession.

For their role in causing the climate crisis, the world’s leading historical emitters owe the Global South a climate debt, and part of the reparations for this debt is the payment of climate finance to the Global South.

Wealthy nations are not only obligated to cut their carbon emissions as soon as possible and reach zero domestically by 2035, their accumulated historical emissions are so massive that their fair shares of mitigation actions include covering a large part of the costs of a fossil fuel phaseout and a just transition in the Global South. Further, they must also pay for the harm and destruction the climate crisis has inflicted on the Global South.

Global North governments have been shamelessly evading their climate finance obligations for decades. After failing to deliver their miserly target of $100 billion a year—and confronted with an annual climate finance needs estimate of several trillion—they are brazenly shifting the responsibility to Global South countries by calling for “burden-sharing” and “expanding the contributor base.” They repeat the mantra they use in development finance discourse—”the key is to unlock private finance and investments”—and push for incentivizing private capital by guaranteeing profits from climate investments.

In response to the demand for reparations, the chief climate negotiator of the United States in 2009 argued that US citizens today shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions of their ancestors. To be clear, we are not asking the ordinary citizens of the US and other rich countries to shoulder the reparations owed us by their elites, corporations, and governments. Their governments can raise funds for reparations by taxing the polluters and profiteers, stopping tax abuses of big corporations, ending illicit financial flows, and shifting public spending away from fossil fuels, military operations, and the military-industrial complex.

The climate debt owed by rich countries is so enormous as to be incalculable. After all, how can governments fully compensate for all the lives lost and livelihoods ruined? Even if the Global South can never be fully compensated for the damage done, Global North governments should start by paying an amount that covers the costs of mitigation, adaptation, just transition, and loss and damage in the South.

Based on current and projected costs of mitigation, adaptation, just transition, and loss and damage, fair reparations come down to a payment of at least $5 trillion annually to the Global South. Since the $5 trillion is a form of reparations, it is neither aid nor charity and should not be in the form of loans. The yearly $5 trillion should be public, nondebt-creating, and conditionality-free finance, and channeled through democratic and transparent multilateral financial mechanisms.

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Lidy Nacpil is coordinator of Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development.