As aid is cut, social protection is vital to face climate crisis

Olivier De Schutter is United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

Government representatives and delegates from civil society, who have been meeting in Bonn to prepare for the next U.N. climate conference, COP30, will be acutely aware of how dramatically the world has changed since the last COP took place in Azerbaijan last year. 

In just seven months, sweeping cuts to global aid and escalating threats to multilateral cooperation have dealt a brutal blow to international efforts to save the planet from environmental collapse.

The impacts of this assault on foreign aid will be felt hardest in low-income countries, despite them having contributed the least to carbon emissions. 

Limited government capacity and minimal insurance coverage in these countries leave vulnerable communities entirely defenceless, allowing a single flood or wildfire to wipe out people’s homes, assets and livelihoods in minutes. 

Over the past 30 years, more than 90% of deaths and 60% of economic losses from climate disasters have happened in developing countries.    

It bears repeating: the world’s poorest are paying the highest price for a crisis they did not create. 

In 2020, the World Bank estimated that 132 million more people would be pushed into poverty by 2030 as a result of climate change. 

President Donald Trump’s abrupt USAID cuts, followed by the retreat of other major donors as defence spending increasingly takes precedence over international solidarity, will drive this figure even higher.  

Amid a profound upheaval to global aid, this frightening prediction must spur governments to consider alternative, more imaginative ways to protect people in poverty from climate change. 

We need new financing mechanisms

My latest report to the United Nations recommends funding social protection in low-income countries through new financing mechanisms as the best way forward. 

Social protection – government programmes such as basic healthcare, unemployment benefits, cash transfers – has proven to be the most effective weapon in the fight against poverty. It is social protection that stops a family from taking their child out of school in times of crisis or allows households to take calculated risks such as planting higher-return crops that may lead to a higher income and an escape from poverty.

Designed to anticipate crises (such as periods of unemployment and ill-health), social protection programmes ringfence resources in anticipation of the need to provide support.

This is exactly what is needed to protect people in poverty from climate change: predictable support providing people with entitlements that they can rely on when disasters hit, as well as long-term protection from the non-economic damages caused by climate change, such as harm to health. 

Social protection is also built on administrative systems that identify households entitled to benefits and enable them to receive those benefits. 

While far from perfect, these social registries allow governments to ensure that, in an emergency, support quickly reaches the right people – as illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic when countries with robust social registries could rapidly scale up benefits.

Yet nearly half of the world’s population lack any form of social protection coverage whatsoever, leaving billions of people to fend for themselves. In the 50 countries most vulnerable to climate change, 75% of people have no access to social protection.

Bold, imaginative action

Financing is key. Research I presented ahead of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) in Seville later this month, at which governments will agree how to finance sustainable development, showed that it would cost the world’s 26 lowest-income countries $308.5 billion a year to provide their populations with the essential healthcare and basic income security that would safeguard people in poverty from the impacts of climate change. 

This sum (equivalent to 52.3% of their gross domestic product) is out of their reach – made even more so by rating agencies and external creditors forcing them to prioritise debt repayments over investing in basic public services. Around 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on either education or health. 

But there are multiple untapped sources of funding that would make it more than feasible for the international community to step in and plug the social protection ‘finance gap’. Using new financing tools, the international community could raise $759.6 billion a year — more than twice the amount required. 

From taxing extreme wealth and curbing tax abuse to debt-for-social protection swaps (whereby a creditor agrees to cancel part of a country’s debt in exchange for a binding commitment from that country to redirect resources to social protection), new sources of international funding for social protection must be explored. This is particularly urgent in light of the commitment expected to be made at FFD4 to support developing countries to ensure “predictable, adequate and uninterrupted” funding of social protection. 

We know how to best protect people in poverty from the horrors of climate change and we know where the money is to fund these solutions. Yet the world’s poorest people continue to die while we despair and deliberate. In a world transformed, only bold, imaginative action will do.