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Climate Forward

Who pays for climate havoc?

There’s growing grievance against a global system that saddles developing countries with debt after extreme weather disasters.

A woman stands in the middle of an utterly destroyed home, surrounded by tall piles debris and under a cloudy sky, holding a dustpan and broom.
The wreckage of a home in Codrington, Barbuda, in December 2017.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

By now, most of you have read about the tempest over the World Bank president, David Malpass. (Here’s a cheat sheet if you haven’t.)

Truth is, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There is growing grievance against the very rules of the global financial system that the World Bank represents. Climate-vulnerable countries blame those rules for locking them into a spiraling cycle of debt as they try to recover from climate hazards not of their own making — hazards that cost their economies and their people dearly.

According to the International Monetary Fund, 60 percent of low-income countries are in debt distress or at risk of debt distress, meaning their debt repayment obligations are so high that they’re in arrears or they’re seeking to renegotiate their debt payments.

I heard several provocative calls for change last week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meetings. Expect to hear more in the run-up to COP27, the global climate negotiations in Egypt in November. A burning question: Who pays for climate havoc?

A total disaster

Consider the case of Antigua and Barbuda. One September night in 2017, a hurricane with winds gusting up to 185 miles per hour (Ian made landfall in Cuba on Tuesday morning with winds of about 125 m.p.h.) devastated the island of Barbuda. Everything had to be rebuilt. Roads. Houses. Hotels. Its main source of earnings is tourism.

The price tag: $220 million. “Approximately 100 percent of our revenues,” the prime minister, Gaston Browne, told me in an interview on Friday.

At the time, Browne turned to the World Bank for money to build new roads, only to be told that his country was not eligible for a long-term, low-interest loan. Like many of its small-country peers in the Caribbean, Antigua and Barbuda’s per capita income makes it a middle-income country. The loan terms that the bank offered, Browne said, were unaffordable.

Looking beyond income

Those criteria are outdated in the era of climate havoc, Browne argued. International lenders should consider the many vulnerabilities of nations like his — things like how susceptible they are to extreme weather and how indebted they were before that extreme weather hit.

Debt repayments make it virtually impossible, he said, to prepare for the future, all the more so after a hurricane essentially closes down the economy. “When our economies are decimated by hurricanes, we have to borrow to recover,” Browne said. “So it means that we don’t have a lot of resources for adaptation.”

His country is part of a fledgling effort to create a new index designed to measure a range of vulnerabilities. He said he hoped it would expand funding for those countries that are “justifiably in need, but have been precluded.”

Whether development banks and donor countries will agree to a new index remains to be seen.

New rules

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, offered a nod to this idea. Speaking Friday to a coalition of mainly low-income countries that calls itself the Group of 77+China, he called on international development banks to consider “a true view of the vulnerabilities faced by developing countries,” not just their income, to widen the reach of low-interest loans.

He went further, calling for an overhaul of an international set of rules created at a time when most African countries, and much of Asia, were still colonized. “We need to reform a morally bankrupt global financial system,” Guterres said. “This system was created by rich countries to benefit rich countries.”

The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, called for a raft of reforms to the rules of the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, too. She proposed low-interest loans for infrastructure that would help countries be more resilient to climate shocks and to stop extra charges on the interest that heavy borrowers now have to pay if they need additional funds.

For Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, to be disqualified from low-interest loans means turning to commercial banks and having to pay high interest rates that are even harder to pay back. “It creates a very inequitable position,” he said.

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A firefighter in Bourg, La., during Hurricane Ida last year. Wind speeds in the storm rose to 150 miles per hour, from 85 m.p.h., in less than 24 hours.Credit...Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Stronger, faster: As Earth warms, hurricanes are intensifying more quickly and unpredictably. That’s a problem for safety officials, who have less time to assess threats.

Addressing inequality: The E.P.A. is creating an office of environmental justice to address the disproportionate harm caused by pollution and climate change in communities of color.

‘Climate smart’ farming: The Biden administration committed $20 billion to help farmers adopt techniques that are less harmful to the environment.

Protecting New York: The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed a $52 billion project to protect the city from storm surges with a system of movable sea barriers.

China’s auto market: More electric cars are expected to be sold in the country this year than in the rest of the world combined.

Depleting the high seas: The activities of China’s fishing fleet, the world’s biggest, in international waters is largely unregulated. But its effects are felt across the oceans.

A wildfire’s aftermath: A prescribed burn set by the Forest Service turned into a huge blaze in New Mexico. Now, its ashes have set off a drinking water crisis.



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A marine biologist inspected a buoy fitted with sensors and microphones to detect whales about 25 miles off San Francisco Bay.Credit...Dexter Hake for The New York Times

So far this year at least four whales have been killed by ships around San Francisco Bay. Scientists are now using artificial intelligence to avert collisions. Their system predicts where whales are likely to be and listens for their songs to warn ships when they need to slow down. It has been successful elsewhere.


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Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward. Read past editions of the newsletter here.

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A correction was made on 
Sept. 27, 2022

Because of an editing error, a picture caption with an earlier version of this newsletter misspelled the name of the main town on Barbuda. It is Codrington, not Cordington.

How we handle corrections

Somini Sengupta is The Times’s international climate correspondent. She has also covered the Middle East, West Africa and South Asia and is the author of the book, “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young.” More about Somini Sengupta

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