While delivering the keynote address at a side-event during COP30, Climate Change Secretary Aisha Moriani said that Pakistan called on the international community to provide grant-based and predictable financing for climate-vulnerable developing countries. This goes to the core of the whole climate justice debate which starts on the premise that countries which have polluted more have a moral responsibility to pay for the damage and to build resilience in countries vulnerable to climate change. Fairness would demand that countries which polluted the most would be worst hit by climate change, but life isn’t fair, and it is the least developed, most exploited countries, which are suffering the effects the most, a pattern which is expected to continue in future. The first line of defence is to claim that climate change isn’t happening, the so-called climate change deniers, who include US President Donald Trump.
The second line of defence is to offer climate financing as loans. The countries most in need of the loans are already mostly in the debt trap, with countries like Pakistan obliged to keep up with debt servicing payments by borrowing. It is an unfortunate reality that development loans which put these countries in the debt trap have not pulled themselves out of poverty. Those loans have been embezzled by the elites as the price of political cooperation with the lenders. The lenders were the countries which had benefited most by polluting, they have raised the fears of corruption as an excuse to lend at interest instead of making grants. This is a deliberate ignoring of the fact that loans have not prevented corruption in the past, and will not do so now. However, Pakistan has fallen in with this loan-based funding by borrowing from the IMF.
It should not look on getting grants as an easy way of getting foreign exchange, something other heavily indebted countries will do. Climate change is not one or the other nation’s problem, and it is only when developed countries realize they will not escape that they might begin giving rants to make the Third World take necessary steps. The whole issue demands the entire world adopt a new way of doing things. The climate crisis is definitely too big for any one nation to handle, and may well be too big for the present system of nation states to handle. It is time to think out of the box while there is still a box.
