“Reorienting global finance to serve the climate… » The summit convened by Emmanuel Macron, June 22 and 23, gave birth to a mouse. Has it just been decided to suspend debt service for countries in the South that would be in the throes of disasters? “natural”.
The President of the World Bank believes that“offering this break will allow them to focus on what matters”. The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, was delighted that the 100 billion dollars of special drawing rights, promised to the poorest countries in 2021, had finally been met, since “it is the future of humanity that is discussed here”…
It is first crucial to denounce this pseudo-generosity before going further with the concept of climate debt. It has long been recognized that the debt of the South, however odious and illegitimate, has allowed the maintenance of deeply unjust relations between the two hemispheres, relations that slavery and colonization had already constantly placed under the angle domination, first for cultural and then increasingly geostrategic reasons, of extractivism and looting, always to the detriment of local populations.
Climate change reinforces North-South inequalities, in an unbearable injustice which means that the North (United States, Canada, Japan, Europe, countries of the former Soviet Union), representing only 20% of the world’s population, is responsible for 80% of the “historical” accumulation of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, while the South, in inverse proportions of population and responsibility, are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change which will soon render many regions of the globe strictly uninhabitable.
Three basic principles
This injustice is allegedly recognized through the idea of “common but differentiated responsibility” and the establishment of the Green Climate Fund in 2011: 100 billion dollars per year. However, it is estimated that the South lacks 2,000 billion per year, China excluded, to deal with the climate issue alone, ie twenty times more! As for the estimated needs to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, including issues of poverty, hunger, health, education, they are estimated at 6,000 billion per year until 2030. We are therefore very far from the mark, and it is to this issue that the idea of climate debt intends to respond.
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