By Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

On July 13,2023, Reuter News Service carried a story which stated that the US will not pay reparations to developing countries hit by disasters related to global climate change. John Kerry, the US special envoy on climate change, told a congressional hearing that under no circumstances will the US pay climate reparations.  This statement comes in close proximity to a climate of optimism in France as a number of world leaders gathered to fine-tune proposals ahead of COP28 which will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates.

Damage and loss have always been a sore point for many of the so-called developed countries of the world.  Notwithstanding the fact that Europe, the US, Japan, China, and to a lesser extent India have been the main contributors to rising levels of green house gasses in the earth’s atmosphere, many of these countries have been very reticent about acknowledging their moral responsibility to aid countries that are on the receiving end of catastrophic climate events triggered by global climate change.

John Kerry’s statement come against a backdrop of denialism currently trending in conservative American politics. The trend of denialism is attempting to reframe the issue of slavery in American history to make America’s treatment of African Americans more palatable to the taste of the more conservatively minded in America. After all, how could US slavery be so bad when everyone was doing it including the Africans who (wait for it) sold their fellow Africans to Europeans.

In 2009 at COP15, developed countries decided to commit to a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.  Needless to say, the rhetoric about mobilizing $100 billion a year to aid developing countries battling the deadly effects of climate change has proven to be nothing more that another way of adding more CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere.

At the recently concluded Global Climate Finance Summit in Paris, where some forty world leaders gathered to give impetus to a new global finance agenda, the concept of $100 billion a year was formally interred and a new sum of $100 billion in total was accepted as a new pledge by developed countries. This new pledge regrettably falls far short of what is needed by the developing world. On the positive side, if the $100 billion becomes available, it would constitute the beginning of a journey in the right direction. 

Both the World Bank and the IMF seem open to the ideas contained in the Bridgetown Initiative These ideas if implemented would result in significant debt relief for developing countries hit by natural disasters. The IMF has also reported that it has achieved its goal of making $100 billion in special drawing rights to countries that are extremely vulnerable to climate catastrophes.

In 2021, a number of rich countries agreed to re-channel some of their unused IMF special drawing rights to poor countries. Rich countries agreed in principle to lending their special drawing rights back to the IMF so that the IMF could in turn lend the funds at below market rates to low-income countries. It remains to be seen if this $100 billion will actually be made available especially in the light of the hardline stance taken by John Kerry.

The Bridgetown Initiative and the goals pursued by the Global Finance Summit in France have introduce a much-needed corrective in global finance. This corrective will prove to be a life-line for the developing world as poor nations continues to deal with the fall-out from the global pandemic, limited cash liquidity, stifling national debt, and mother nature on steroids.

The developed world is morally obligated to stand in the gap and give back some of the wealth extracted from the developing world by less than ethical methods. The moral obligation of the developed world also stems from the undeniable fact that the developed world, with its industrial revolution, has brought the human family to the gate of extinction. Bad faith negotiations at this juncture of human history may very well push the planet we call home over the edge and into the abyss of oblivion. 

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the Founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Future of Africa and the Caribbean: Challenges and Possibilities.