Laurie van der Burg is global public finance campaign manager at Oil Change International. Mariana Paoli is global advocacy lead at Christian Aid. Rebecca Thissen is global advocacy lead at Climate Action Network International.
While climate disasters intensify across the Global South, another connected crisis is quietly unfolding – one with less media coverage, but just as deadly. Governments are drowning in debt, and the money they need for clean energy and resilience is flowing not into solar panels, but to creditors in the Global North.
Meanwhile, the US is on a mission to make this debt and climate spiral even worse: it is pressuring the World Bank and other global institutions to abandon climate action and to instead use their public funds to underwrite the private profits of American and multinational corporations, including through investments in fossil fuels.
Climate shocks and volatile currencies hike debt burden for poor countries
At meetings this week in New York to prepare for the United Nations’ 4th Financing for Development conference (FfD4) that will take place in Seville in June, countries face a clear choice: reject these attempts – including US efforts to weaken its outcomes – or lay the foundation for a renewed financing framework in Seville – one that will ensure the world’s poorest countries get the resources they need to survive.
A system built to extract
Many Global South countries now spend five times more on debt repayments than on climate action. Some cannot rebuild after floods or droughts because they’re paying interest on loans from decades ago. Others remain dependent on expensive fossil fuel imports – or stuck exporting oil and gas just to stay afloat.
This isn’t misfortune – it’s design. The global financial system was built by – and continues to benefit – the rich countries that did the most to cause the climate crisis. Today, they are demanding loan repayments from those who contributed the least, while offering “climate finance” largely in the form of new debt.
Ghana, for example, received over $2 billion in World Bank financing for oil and gas projects, yet project delays have left it reliant on expensive fossil fuel imports. On top of that, “take or pay” contracts that guarantee profits for foreign investors but not public coffers are costing the country over $1 billion a year, while many Ghanaians still lack access to affordable energy.
This is not an isolated case. Many countries are trapped in a vicious cycle of relying on fossil fuel extraction to service their debts, fueled by conditions imposed by international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A study from the ODI think-tank found that debt levels rose sharply in the last decade in major oil and gas exporting countries across the Global
South.
Global South countries have the solutions
Global South groups – such as the African Group and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) – have put forward clear, workable solutions. They have successfully pushed for establishing a UN Tax Convention to close tax loopholes and stop the outflow of wealth through tax havens, negotiations for which are ongoing. They have also repeatedly called for dramatically increased public, grant-based climate finance.
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With 2025 declared a Jubilee year for debt forgiveness by the late Pope Francis, the calls for debt cancellation and to adopt a UN Sovereign Debt Convention have become impossible to ignore. The current draft text for FfD4 calls for a process to establish such a Convention, which would provide an alternative to the insufficient attempts to tackle the debt crisis by the G20 and the IMF, and finally put debtor and creditor countries at equal footing.
The Convention could set up a multilateral sovereign debt resolution mechanism to deliver faster and fairer debt restructurings and cancellation. It could develop a new approach to debt sustainability framework and analyses (DSAs), ensuring that the assessment is aligned with human rights, climate and sustainable development needs.
But the Global North is blocking reform
Instead of stepping up and supporting financial system reform, wealthy governments – including the UK, France, and Germany – are cutting aid and outsourcing their responsibilities to the private sector. They are obstructing bold action in UN spaces and instead push to keep decision-making behind closed doors in elite clubs like the OECD, where poorer countries have no seat at the table. Their approach of prioritising the mobilisation of private money and offering loans rather than grants or highly-concessional public money has been tested and failed. Even the World Bank chief economist Indermit Gill admitted that the “Billions to Trillions” agenda never delivered.
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Rather than supporting harmful approaches and piecemeal reforms, the EU and UK should strengthen their alliances with Global South countries and back their proposals for system change and more democratic governance of financial institutions.
This would help free up the public money needed to fund the solutions. Money is out there, it is just a matter of political will. Just the world’s 10 richest individuals hold more than $1 trillion in combined wealth. Fossil fuel companies made $1 trillion in profits last year. Governments still give hundreds of billions annually in fossil fuel subsidies, paid for by the public.
Taxing the ultra-wealthy, making polluters pay, ending fossil fuel handouts, and cancelling exploitative debts, could free up more than $5 trillion a year – enough to fund a global Just Transition and build a
more equal, stable world.
Seville is a moment of reckoning
The Seville conference is a rare opportunity to prove that international cooperation can still deliver in an age of crisis. For too long, climate finance, debt relief, tax justice, and fossil fuel phaseout have been treated in isolation. But these crises are deeply connected – and demand a unified response.
Seville must be the moment when governments back Global South–led solutions that can start shifting the global economy toward justice, resilience, and sustainability. At the heart of that effort must be securing a UN Sovereign Debt Convention – to finally rebalance a system rigged against the world’s poorest.
Wealthy countries must rise to the occasion – not with more financial engineering, but by strengthening the public tools that serve the common good. Anything less isn’t climate action. It’s exploitation with a green label.
The post Without debt relief, climate action will fail appeared first on Climate Home News.
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak -
Africa wants adaptation finance on COP31 agenda, raising risk of a fight
The African Group wants dedicated space on tripling adaptation finance, the Green Climate Fund and trade, setting up a possible clash
To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’
None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation
The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines
With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.
At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance.
The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK.
In a recent press conference, China’s environment vice-minister Li Gao noted the need to “uphold multilateralism” and send a “clear political signal” that the global community is united around climate action.