In climate diplomacy, as in all statecraft, leadership begins at home.
When President Biden went before the United Nations on Tuesday and called for urgent global action to confront the widening climate crisis, he stood taller for pressing the robust clean energy investments contained in his domestic Build Back Better agenda.
And, while vowing to lead “through the power of our example,” Biden did just that. He pledged to double U.S. financial assistance to help developing nations confront what he called “the merciless march” of climate hazard and harm, bringing that aid to some $11.4 billion a year by 2024.
It’s the right thing to do, and Congress should fully fund the pledge.
People living on the jagged frontlines of climate hazard and harm desperately need the help. They’re not responsible for creating the problem. And we have a historic opportunity to advance global equity and narrow the gap between rich and poor by making sure low-income countries have access to the capital and technology driving the low-carbon economy of the future.
Climate change is an onerous burden rich countries have inflicted on lower-income nations. After all, the world’s wealthier nations, making up 51% of the population, account for 86% of the world’s carbon pollution.
Increasingly, it’s the people who’ve done the least to cause the problem who are paying the highest cost for its consequences. That’s fundamentally unjust.
More than that, developing nations often lack the resources to protect their communities from the climate impacts that threaten the homes, livelihoods and very lives of mounting millions of people worldwide.
As the current UN science report makes clear — and as we’re experiencing in the monster storms, raging fires, deadly floods and forever drought sweeping our own country — the climate crisis is upending life in every corner of the world.
Rising seas, though, are often a matter of life and death for those who live on small islands or low-lying coasts. Heatwaves can be lethal for people who work outdoors or lack air conditioning. Storms and floods take the heaviest toll on populations that lack the resources to flee. When croplands turn to desert, low-income people don’t just move; they starve. And when glaciers vanish and ice sheets melt, vulnerable communities struggle to replace clean sources of water to drink.
To help low-income countries confront these problems, invest in resilience and get more clean energy from the wind and sun, wealthy nations pledged assistance that was to total $100 billion a year by 2020. That can be leveraged to attract additional private capital. It will enable developing countries to create clean energy jobs, protect vulnerable populations from climate ills and make a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels
For perspective, $100 billion is just 5% as much as global military spending, which actually grew last year, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, to a record $2 trillion.
In fact, though, the global community has come up about $20 billion short of its own annual goal, meeting just 80% of its pledged amount. It’s past time to make good on that promise, to raise global ambition even more, and to commit at least half of this money to helping countries cope with the growing burdens of climate change.
Biden’s announcement Tuesday follows last week’s news that the European Union will raise its annual climate assistance to low-income countries by $4.7 billion, to more than $25 billion a year. It comes just six weeks before the nations of the world gather for the UN climate conference in Glasgow the follow-up to the 2015 conference that produced the landmark Paris climate accord.
In Paris, 195 countries agreed to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels, and to help low-income countries invest in clean energy to help meet that goal and resilience to protect their people and advance equity. Glasgow must be about raising global ambition around all three.
Failing to meet the need could condemn people to climate calamity across much of the developing world. We’re seeing a grim preview of how that might shake out in wealthy countries’ response to COVID relief and the ways the pandemic has widened global inequity.
That disparity surfaces in one of the most shocking inequities of our time: while 56% of those living in wealthy countries like the United States, Germany and Japan have been vaccinated against COVID, just 1% of those living across the developing world have received the life-saving vaccine.
That’s inexcusable, if not shameful. We have the resources to provide vaccines to everyone on the planet, and we need to do so now.
The pandemic, though, took the world by surprise. The United States and its wealthy counterparts have watched the climate crisis grow steadily worse by the decade, leaving them every opportunity, even now, to do better by the world’s most vulnerable people. That’s what climate leadership demands.
Bapna is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group with more than 3 million supporters nationwide