Franziska Mager is senior researcher and advocacy lead for climate and inequalities at the Tax Justice Network.
As the climate crisis accelerates, global fault lines widen. Wealthy nations gut aid budgets while pouring fortunes into their militaries. Their climate finance commitments ring hollow, hidden behind claims that public funds have run dry.
But the money is there – and a bold tax justice agenda can unlock it. Reclaiming tax sovereignty – the power to decide how wealth is taxed and where it goes – can shift resources from billionaires and corporate giants to real climate solutions.
Tax Justice Network analysis shows governments could raise an extra US$2.6 trillion a year by applying a modest wealth tax on the richest 0.5% and ending corporate tax abuse. This would more than cover global climate finance needs and still leave most countries with billions to invest in care, education and green jobs at home.
Coalition set sights on taxing luxury air travel to fund climate action
The climate crisis is accelerating. Floods, heatwaves and crop failures are pushing more people into precarity. Climate adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage could cost US$9 trillion a year by 2030. Yet the global community is still scrambling to honour a US$100 billion pledge made over 15 years ago.
As attention turns from the Bonn climate talks to the fourth Financing for Development conference in Seville, climate finance remains a structural void that policy declarations alone cannot fill.
On the road to COP30 in Belém, governments face a critical choice: keep chasing inadequate voluntary climate finance handouts, or finally confront the rigged tax systems that let the super-rich and big polluters amass obscene wealth while the planet burns.
Plugging leaky tax systems
As our research shows, fair taxes on extreme wealth and curbing multinational tax abuse could raise more than double the UN’s US$1.3 trillion annual climate finance goal for 2035. The real issue isn’t where new money comes from, but why governments let public resources leak through a broken tax system.
Applying a modest annual wealth tax of 1.7-3.5% and reclaiming tax from multinationals that underpay could unlock revenue equal to 2.4% of global GDP. This money could be raised today if governments closed loopholes and took action.
Our modelling based on countries’ historic emissions responsibility shows striking results: with a US$300 billion global climate finance fund, 89% of countries could cover their share and still have billions left for public services. Even with a US$1.5 trillion fund, 58% would contribute their fair share and have money to spare.
Take the United States. It could raise enough additional revenue to contribute US$365 billion a year towards climate finance and still be left with US$412 billion to spend at home. China, India, the United Kingdom and Brazil follow the same pattern.
This is the core message of our climate finance slider tool. Taxing extreme wealth and curbing tax abuse does not pit climate justice against development. It enables both. The interactive tool shows how much countries could raise and how much they could contribute if tax rules were rebalanced in favour of people and planet.
Governments lose tax control
So why are countries still acting like climate finance is unaffordable?
The answer lies in decades of eroded tax sovereignty. Governments have signed away their taxing rights through unfair treaties, handed out corporate tax breaks under economic coercion, and let wealth pour into secrecy jurisdictions. In doing so, they’ve stripped themselves of the power – and the will – to tax the richest and biggest polluters driving the climate crisis.
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Today, 61% of countries have an “endangered” level of tax sovereignty or worse — meaning they are failing to collect tax revenue worth at least 5% of what they already raise, largely from their richest households and from multinational corporations that underpay tax.
Nearly a fifth of countries fall into the “negated” category, missing out on the equivalent of 15% or more of their annual tax revenue. These are not natural constraints. They are political outcomes shaped by an unequal global financial system.
Across the Global South, the consequences are especially severe. Governments face impossible tradeoffs between education and adaptation, debt service and disaster response. Climate finance cannot be separated from this wider fiscal injustice.
When forced to borrow for every disaster or rely on aid pledges, governments lose both agency and time. The race to build resilience becomes a race against the clock – one they cannot win without revenue.
Wealth taxes popular with voters
It’s time to reframe the debate. Climate finance can’t rely on broken promises or voluntary pledges. It must come from fair, redistributive tax systems that reflect both capacity to pay and responsibility for emissions.
The upcoming UN Tax Convention is a once in a generation opportunity to rebalance global tax rules. Done right, it could help countries tax their richest residents and corporations fairly, ending tax havens, profit-shifting and billionaire impunity.
Comment: A global wealth tax is needed to help fund a just green transition
But we do not need to wait for negotiations to conclude. Countries can act now by introducing wealth taxes, renegotiating exploitative tax treaties, increasing transparency and aligning fiscal policies with climate goals.
These reforms are not only possible. They are popular. Polling consistently shows widespread support for taxing extreme wealth to fund public goods.
Extreme wealth fuels climate inaction, rising debt and inequality. In a world on fire, refusing to tax those who profit most is no longer neutral – it’s a global risk.
The post There is no climate finance gap – only a tax sovereignty gap appeared first on Climate Home News.
There is no climate finance gap – only a tax sovereignty gap
Vishal Prasad is director of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change.
When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its advisory opinion on climate change last year, it marked a turning point not just for the Pacific, but for international climate law.
The court was unambiguous: states have legal obligations to protect the environment from greenhouse gas emissions, and they face accountability when they fail. For those of us who carried this campaign from a classroom in Vanuatu to Europe and New York, it was a moment of profound validation.
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But we have always said that the advisory opinion was a tool, not an endpoint. The ICJ affirmed what many in the Pacific have been saying for some time. Now we have a legal blueprint, we must carry this momentum from the courtrooms to the negotiating rooms.
Potential to shape climate politics
The advisory opinion has already begun to reshape the climate landscape. At COP30 in Belém, we saw countries that had supported the campaign citing the opinion in their interventions, while those blocking progress were clearly concerned of its implications. Its potential to shape climate politics and policy is significant.
This year we have arrived at the mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn not only with the advisory opinion, but with a UN General Assembly resolution endorsing it. Despite a fierce campaign from the usual suspects, just eight countries, including the USA, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran voted against. That is a victory for multilateralism at a moment when multilateralism is under strain.
UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court
But we know that advisory opinions alone are not enough. Legal clarity will not automatically translate into reduced emissions, increased finance flows or stronger national climate plans. That translation requires political will in the negotiating rooms, both here in Bonn and all the way through Fiji and finally in Antalya this November.
What the Pacific needs from this negotiating year
The Pacific put significant political capital into the joint Australia-Pacific bid for COP31. It is fair to say that the compromise of Australia holding the role of president of negotiations while the COP is held and presided over by Türkiye is not what we imagined.
But we in the Pacific are used to looking for silver linings. Both Australia and Türkiye have acknowledged the important role the Pacific will have at COP31, through the appointment of Pacific champions and the hosting of a Pacific Pre-COP in Fiji with a leaders event in Tuvalu. These are genuine opportunities to bring the world to our shores and ensure that Pacific issues are front and centre going into the final negotiations.
But we are not naive. Envoy positions and meeting locations are just the architecture of goodwill. We need to see that goodwill converted into concrete negotiating outcomes and finance.
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The Pacific helped put Australia’s climate minister Chris Bowen in this important position, so we expect to see Australia advocate not only for us, but to turn a mirror towards itself as one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel exporters.
At Bonn, and then in Antalya, we need ambition on mitigation that reflects the ICJ’s clarity on state obligations and the science. That means action on fossil fuels.
We need climate finance that is new, additional and accessible to the countries that need it most. In the Pacific we have already demonstrated what that looks like.
The Pacific Resilience Facility is the first climate finance facility designed, governed and managed by Pacific people, built specifically to reach the grassroots and community initiatives that larger funds routinely bypass. We need the international community to meet that ambition with contributions that reflect climate justice, starting with pledges to meet the $500-million capitalisation goal.
And we need the oceans – which are the lifeblood of the Pacific and a critical part of the global climate system – treated as a central element of the negotiations rather than a thematic aside.
Energy crisis driven by imported fossil fuels
The days of speaking about climate and fossil fuels purely as a moral issue are long gone. Pacific ministers recently adopted the Tassiriki Call for a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific, in the context of a deepening energy crisis that has triggered states of emergency in several Pacific nations. Our dependence on imported fossil fuels is both a climate and an economic vulnerability.
Conflict in the Middle East is pushing our region into an energy crisis. We are dependent on imported fossil fuels for 80% of our energy needs. My home country of Fiji could see an increased fuel bill of nearly three times our annual healthcare budget.
Comment: COP31 must persuade countries to make fossil fuel transition plans
We need the technical and financial support to transition to 100% renewable energy. Not only because it is what the world owes us for decades of carbon pollution that continue to render parts of our home uninhabitable, damaging ecosystems and culture. But because we must be part of that transition. Fossil fuels have proven to be the greatest source of damage to our climate, and with their volatility, to our sovereignty as well.
What next?
The demands have not changed. Greater action on mitigation, adaptation, finance, loss and damage: these remain the substance of what the Pacific requires from the international community. What has changed is the legal foundation beneath them.
The ICJ has affirmed that these are not requests. They are obligations. The task this year is to make the negotiations reflect that.
The post The Pacific made history in the courts – now we must do it in the negotiations appeared first on Climate Home News.
The Pacific made history in the courts – now we must do it in the negotiations
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In the shadow of Miami’s skyline, in water churned daily by boats and jet skis, juvenile great hammerhead sharks—a critically endangered species—spend the first two years of their lives. A few miles from downtown, researchers recently pulled a 12-foot critically endangered sawfish from the same shallows. The species has been dying off in alarming numbers across South Florida’s waters since 2024, in an event scientists suspect was set in motion by record ocean heat.
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