Climate Justice Denied by Delays

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram  and Kuhaneetha Bai Kalaicelvan

Note: A critical response to this article, from Ambassador Byron Blake of Jamaica is available here

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 23 2025 (IPS) - Opinions have been divided over the annual UN climate conferences. While some see COP30 in Belém, Brazil, as confirming their irrelevance, others see it as a turning point in the struggle for climate justice.

Accelerating decline

Negotiations continued there as the 1.5°C target slipped beyond reach.

As the world accelerates toward catastrophic warming, ecological systems are collapsing, and millions across the Global South face increasingly life-threatening situations.

Rising sea levels, extreme heat, droughts and flooding are undermining food security, displacing communities, and exacerbating inequality and living conditions.

The economic costs of climate disasters are accelerating. Social and human costs continue to rise, with lives, livelihoods and ecosystems destroyed.

Fiscal austerity and indebtedness are making things worse. Instead, governments increase military spending and subsidise fossil fuels, accelerating planetary warming.

Business interest in ‘green transitions’ focuses on new profit-making opportunities. As renewable energy grows, energy supplies increase as fossil fuels are slowly replaced.

COP of Truth?

In his opening speech to the thirtieth Conference of Parties (COP30) in Belém, host President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised it would be the ‘COP of Truth’.

He urged world leaders and governments to demonstrate their commitments by presenting their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for its Global Mutirão (community mobilisation) outcome.

Although not officially present, the US continued to frustrate the climate talks by urging petrostates to resist efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

The COP30 Climate Change Performance Index exposed governments’ weak commitments to combating planetary warming over the past 21 years.

Its report analysed the policies of 63 countries responsible for 90% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The top three spots were kept empty to emphasise that no country has shown sufficient ambition to do so.

For 2025, Saudi Arabia took last place, with the US, Russia and Iran not far behind. Trump’s latest policies have set the US further back.

Meanwhile, the White House threatened sanctions and tariffs against governments that support a global tax on GHG emissions by international shipping.

Just transition?

COP30 in Belém continued to fail to achieve what is urgently needed: binding GHG emission cuts, phasing out fossil fuels, meaningfully compensating for past losses and damages, or better financing for climate adaptation.

COP30 adopted the Belém Mechanism for Just Global Transition – a new UNFCCC arrangement to overcome the fragmentation and inadequacy of such efforts worldwide.

However, the mechanism lacks both finances and plans to protect those harmed by decarbonisation initiatives. Nor are there resources for ‘green industrialisation’.

Climate justice is still misrepresented as threatening livelihoods rather than as key to survival. The climate justice movement must convince the public that it is key to social progress.

Climate finance setback

Lula appealed again for increased climate financing for the Global South following the dismal record since the 2009 Copenhagen COP.

Brazil also launched the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF) to incentivise countries conserving their forests. Although it failed to raise its target of $25 billion, 53 countries endorsed the TFFF, with pledges in Belém totalling $6.6 billion.

Belém also offered new suggestions for climate finance, in its ‘Baku to Belém (B2B) Roadmap to 1.3T’ (USD1.3 trillion), and the report of the COP30 Circle of Finance Ministers (CoFM).

The CoFM involved 35 finance ministers representing three-fifths of the world’s population and its GHG emissions.

The COP30 promise to “at least triple” finance for developing countries’ climate adaptation by 2035 was again blocked by the Global North. LDC requests for grant financing were also ignored yet again.

Promoting voluntarism

Brazilian COP30 chair Corrêa do Lago proposed various compromises to encourage those disappointed by UN processes to take climate action.

His proposed ‘voluntary roadmap’ to transition from fossil fuels will be discussed at the Colombia/Netherlands-led ‘coalition of the willing’ conference in April 2026.

The chair’s other voluntary roadmap for forest conservation followed the COP30 agreement’s failure to condemn deforestation with stronger language.

The adoption of the 59 compromise indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation was delayed by poorer African countries’ inability to afford immediate implementation. The compromise was a two-year delay, referred to as the ‘Belém-Addis vision’.

Belém as turning point

For the first time, the US was officially absent from the Belém COP. With over 56,000 delegates registered, attendance was second only to Dubai, with more than 1,600 business lobbyists present.

COPs make slow progress by painstakingly extending the consensus for climate action. Belém may shift the COPs’ focus from negotiations to initiatives, a precedent which can be abused or advanced.

Belém’s Mutirão Decision (Action Agenda) focuses on delivery, drawing from the ‘whole of society’. Its 30 measurable

Key Objectives were based on the 2023 Global Stocktake.

While Belém’s outcomes fell short of most expectations, many acknowledge Brazil did its best under trying circumstances. Nonetheless, climate justice is being denied by the continuing procrastination of powerful vested interests.

Although not quite the ‘COP of Truth’, inclusion and implementation that Lula promised, Belém reversed the backward slide of recent COPs, which the Global South must build upon before it is too late.

Related IPS Articles:

• North Worsens Tropical Catastrophe

• Inequality Worsens Planetary Heating

• Western Climate Hypocrisy Exposed by NATO Energy Policy

• Net Zero by 2050 Delays Needed Urgent Climate Action

• Rich Nation Hypocrisy Accelerating Global Heating

• Carbon Markets Biased, Distorted, Undermined

• Rich Distort Climate Problems, Offer Self-Serving Solutions

• Action Delayed, Justice Denied by Voluntary ESG Approach

• Insider Exposé of ESG Greenwashing

• Beware Climate Finance Charade

• World Bank Climate Finance Plan Little Help, Unfair

• Can Carbon Trading Stop Global Heating?

• Rich Nations Doubly Responsible for Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Available online here: Climate Justice Denied by Delays

North Worsens Tropical Catastrophe

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Sep 9 2025 (IPS) - Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have risen over the last two centuries, with current and accumulated emissions per capita from rich nations greatly exceeding those of the Global South.

Tropical vulnerability

The last six millennia have seen much higher ‘carrying capacities’, soil fertility, population densities, and urbanisation in the tropics than in the temperate zone.

Most of the world’s population lives in tropical and subtropical areas in developing nations, now increasingly threatened by planetary heating.

Different environments, geographies, ecologies and means affect vulnerability to planetary heating. Climate change’s effects vary considerably, especially between tropical and temperate regions.

Extreme weather events – cyclones, hurricanes, or typhoons – are generally much more severe in the tropics, which are also much more vulnerable to planetary heating.

Although they have emitted relatively less GHGs per capita, tropical developing countries must now adapt much more to planetary heating and its consequences.

Many rural livelihoods have become increasingly unviable, forcing ‘climate refugees’ to move away. Increasing numbers in the countryside have little choice but to leave.

Worse, economic and technological changes of recent decades have limited job creation in many developing countries, causing employment to fall further behind labour force growth.

Unequal development has also worsened climate injustice. Adaptation efforts are far more urgent in the tropics as planetary heating has damaged these regions much more.

Technological solutions?

While science may offer solutions, innovation has become increasingly commercialised for profit. Previously, developing countries could negotiate technology transfer agreements, but this option is becoming less available.

Strengthened intellectual property rights (IPRs) limit technology transfer, innovation, and development. The World Trade Organization (WTO) greatly increased the scope of IPRs in 1995 with its new Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) provisions.

Thus, access to technology depends increasingly on ability to pay and getting government permission, slowing climate action in the Global South. Financial constraints doubly handicap the worst off.

Despite rapidly mounting deaths due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, European governments refused to honour the West’s public health exception (PHE) concession in 2001 to restart WTO ministerial talks after the 1999 Seattle debacle.

Instead of implementing the TRIPS PHE as the pandemic quickly spread, Europeans dragged out negotiations until a poor compromise was reached years after the pandemic had been officially declared and millions had died worldwide.

With the second Trump administration withdrawing again from the World Health Organization (WHO) and cutting research funding, tropical threats will continue to dominate the WHO list of neglected diseases.

Climate finance inadequate

Citing the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), rich nations claimed they could only afford to contribute a hundred billion dollars annually to climate finance for developing countries in line with the sustainable development principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’.

This hundred-billion-dollar promise was made before the 2009 Copenhagen Conference of the Parties (COP) to secure support for a significant new climate agreement after the US Senate rejected the Kyoto Protocol before the end of the 20th century.

Rich nations promised to raise their concessional climate finance contributions from 2020 after recovery from the recession following the GFC. However, official development assistance has declined while military spending pledges have risen sharply.

The rich OECD nations now claim that the hundred-billion-dollar climate finance promise has been met with some new ‘creative accounting’, including Italian government funding support for a commercial gelateria chain abroad!

In recent climate finance talks, Western governments increasingly insist that only mitigation funding should qualify as climate finance, claiming adaptation efforts do not slow planetary heating.

Meanwhile, reparations funds for ‘losses and damages’ remain embarrassingly low. Worse, in recent years, much of the West has abandoned specific promises to slow planetary heating.

Despite being among the greatest GHG emitters per capita, the USA has made the least progress. The two Trump administrations’ aggressive reversals of modest earlier US commitments have further reduced the negligible progress so far.

In late 2021, the Glasgow climate COP pledged to end coal burning for energy. But less than half a year later, the West abandoned this promise to block energy imports from Russia after it invaded Ukraine.

Concessional to commercial finance

Responding to developing countries’ demands for more financial resources on concessional terms to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and address the climate crisis, World Bank president Jim Kim promoted the ‘from billions to trillions’ financing slogan.

The catchphrase was used to urge developing countries to take much more commercial loans as access to concessional finance declined and borrowing terms tightened.

With lower interest rates in the West due to unconventional monetary policies following the 2008 GFC, many developing nations increased borrowing until interest rates were sharply raised from early 2022.

Funds leaving developing countries in great haste precipitated widespread debt distress, especially in many poorer developing countries. Thus, purported market financial solutions compounded rather than mitigated the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, growing geopolitical hostilities, leading to what some consider a new Cold War, are accelerating planetary heating and further threatening tropical ecologies, rural livelihoods, and well-being.

Related IPS Articles:

• Net Zero by 2050 Delays Needed Urgent Climate Action

• Western Climate Hypocrisy Exposed by NATO Energy Policy

• Rich Nation Hypocrisy Accelerating Global Heating

• Carbon Markets Biased, Distorted, Undermined

• Insider Exposé of ESG Greenwashing

• Beware Climate Finance Charade

• Can Carbon Trading Stop Global Heating?

• COP27 Fiddling as World Warms

• Climate Hypocrisy Ensures Global Warming

Available online at: North Worsens Tropical Catastrophe

Inequality Worsens Planetary Heating

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug 12 2025 (IPS) - The accumulation of still growing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in an increasingly unequal world is accelerating planetary heating. It is also worsening disparities, especially between the rich and others, both nationally and internationally.

Unequal emissions

In our grossly unequal world, international disparities account for two-thirds of overall income inequalities. National income aggregates and averages can mislead by obscuring significant disparities within countries.

The World Inequality Report argues that GHG emission disparities are mainly due to inequalities within countries. Meanwhile, GHG emissions continue to grow as their accumulation accelerates planetary heating.

Emissions disparities within nations now account for almost two-thirds of worldwide emissions inequality, nearly doubling from slightly over a third in 1990.

The bottom halves of rich country populations are already at – or close to – the 2030 per capita carbon dioxide equivalent emission targets set by their governments. Yet North America’s wealthiest 10% or decile are the world’s biggest GHG emitters.

Their average emissions are 73 times those of the bottom half of the South and Southeast Asian populations! The East Asian rich also emit high GHGs, but much less than in North America.

The bottom halves of their populations emit nearly ten tons per capita yearly in North America, around five tons in

Europe, and about three tons in East Asia.

The much smaller carbon footprints of most of the Global South contrast with the GHG emissions of the top deciles in their own countries and those of the wealthiest 10% in poorer regions.

The top deciles in South and Southeast Asia emit more than double the GHG emissions of Europe’s lower half. Even sub-Saharan Africa’s top decile emits more than Europe’s lower half on average.

Inequality drives emissions

Jayati Ghosh, Shouvik Chakraborty and Debamanyu Das argue that inequality has been driving increases in GHG emissions. While the bottom halves in the US and Europe reduced per capita emissions by 15-20% between 1990 and 2019, the top 1% increased theirs.

The world’s top decile alone accounts for almost half of GHG emissions. As the wealthy become even richer, their adverse environmental impacts increase.

Despite misleading rhetoric, most carbon taxation is not progressive, typically burdening middle- and low-income groups much more than those most responsible, the rich.

Policies to cut GHG emissions must curb excessive consumption by the rich as well as ‘extractivist’ production worldwide to meet their demands.

Profits trump public interest

Meanwhile, transnational corporations and Western governments have refused to honour the public health exception (PHE) to the World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) rights agreement, TRIPS.

The PHE compromise was agreed to in 2001 to resume WTO trade negotiations at its Doha inter-ministerial meeting after the aborted Seattle conference in 1999.

But then, rich nation governments blocked developing countries’ requests for a PHE waiver to urgently produce enough affordable tests, treatments, equipment and vaccines for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hence, it is unlikely significant IP concessions will be forthcoming to boost developing countries’ efforts to mitigate and adapt to effectively address planetary heating.

The sources of global warming are local, while planetary heating is worldwide, albeit uneven. Effective coping policies and measures are costly and generally more burdensome to the poor and middle classes.

Alternative arrangements can enable greater equity and sustainability. However, mobilising more concerted and effective resistance to planetary heating has proved very difficult.

Climate injustice

Historical accumulation of GHG emissions is the leading cause of planetary warming. Developed countries were responsible for almost four-fifths of cumulative GHG emissions from 1850 to 2011.

Meanwhile, their adverse impacts on developing countries in the tropics are worse. The Global South is also less able to cope due to limited policy space and means.

‘Net-zero’ commitments by countries do not acknowledge the huge climate burden imposed by past GHG accumulation, thus undermining prospects for a just transition.

In international negotiations, wealthy economies have evaded historical responsibility for ‘climate debt’ by focusing on contemporary emissions and ignoring their accumulation over the last two centuries.

Ignoring this historical climate debt also serves to legitimise ignoring compensation for those most adversely impacted in low- and lower-middle-income countries, who have already suffered extensive damage and losses.

This pretence is not only unfair, but also counterproductive. It has undermined the international solidarity and cooperation needed to cope with planetary heating.

Breaching threshold

Current rich nations’ projected emissions will use up three-fifths of the remaining global warming threshold for the world’s ‘carbon budget’ until 2050, so as not to exceed the 1.5°C addition to pre-industrial levels!

However, the most optimistic recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario expected the 1.5°C threshold to be crossed by 2040!

But even before US President Trump re-accelerated planetary heating after his re-election, then UN Special Envoy and now Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned this threshold would be breached by the end of this decade!

Related IPS Articles:

• Western Climate Hypocrisy Exposed by NATO Energy Policy

• Net Zero by 2050 Delays Needed Urgent Climate Action

• Net Zero by 2050 Delays Needed Urgent Climate Action

• Global Poverty Grows as Super-Rich Get Richer Faster

• Rich Nation Hypocrisy Accelerating Global Heating

• Carbon Markets Biased, Distorted, Undermined

• Rich Distort Climate Problems, Offer Self-Serving Solutions

• Beware Climate Finance Charade

Available online at: Inequality Worsens Planetary Heating