The climate crisis isn’t just about extreme weather events and reducing emissions. The crisis is also that Global South countries, which are most vulnerable, aren’t able to bounce back, deal with and minimise the loss and damages we experience because of the historical and ongoing exploitation of our lands and our people.
The Global North is, through its industrial activities, historically responsible for 92 percent of excess global CO2 emissions and has endangered our past and present. The $100bn a year is just a drop in the bucket of their debt to humanity as we expect climate impacts to cost $7.9 trillion by 2050. Not only is the current flow of money into climate finance not enough; it also creates debt. According to a 2020 Oxfam report, 80 percent of climate finance came in the form of loans to be paid back and not grants. This means impacted countries are sinking into debt to the countries that historically caused the climate crisis.
The bare minimum that rich countries of the north must do is meet the climate finance pledge of $100bn and then have that continuously grow. And to make sure climate action is going in the right direction, we need more concrete short-term targets and milestones, such as annual carbon budgets, to measure all the ambitious net-zero targets set by country leaders. We don’t need more words from politicians or to go deeper into debt to Global North countries. We need action. We need climate justice.
Reparations that address loss and damage and help countries adapt are crucial for climate justice. Scotland, for example, recently pledged a climate justice fund. But reparations must go beyond a transfer of money to include the redistribution of both finance and the technology and science needed for human-centred adaptation, for a transition to renewable energy, and policy changes to ensure the people who are most marginalised are listened to and prioritised.
In the Philippines, foreign-backed extractive mining industries flatten mountains and displace Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. In 2017, I got a glimpse of the true meaning of fighting for climate justice through an Indigenous Lumad leader in the Philippines. He told me and the other students I was with about how they were being harassed, displaced, and killed – all for protecting the forests from mining companies. That, he said, is why we have no choice but to fight back. It was such a simple idea, but I realised that he was right. It is that simple. We need a system that prioritises people and the planet, not profit, and this can only happen through a collective fight.
It is in this spirit that other youth activists and I call for climate reparations from the Global North to the Global South for the historical injustices rooted in colonialism, profit-oriented plunder and planetary degradation that has led to the climate crisis.
So many of us in the climate movement are angry and tired of these injustices. Unlike so-called world leaders, we know how important it is to connect, collaborate, and show solidarity with one another.
Excerpted: ‘The Global South does not need debt. We need climate justice’
Aljazeera.com