The fight against the climate emergency is being hampered by a debt crisis that involves the world's poorest countries paying more than 12 times as much to their creditors as they are spending on measures to tackle the impact of global heating, a campaign group has warned.
A study of spending in 42 countries by DFI found debt service payments represented 32.7% of the budget in 2023 on average, while responding to the climate crisis stood at 2.5%. Most of the countries studied expect to spend less than 2% of their budgets on climate adaptation and many would be investing less than 1%.
Matthew Martin, DFI's executive director, said a major programme of debt cancellation on the scale of the initiatives of the late 1990s and early 2000s was needed. Debt service averaged 38% across 139 countries in the global south, rising to 57.5% for the low-income countries. Martin said: If the international community is serious about confronting the climate crisis, they need to get serious about comprehensive debt relief for a wide range of countries.
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