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Climate Adaptation Failure Is the Next Debt Crisis for the Global South
This is the new face of global inequality: Countries that contributed least to the crisis are being made to pay twice—first through climate impacts, and then through debt.
Nov 11, 2025
As deadly storms ripped through the Caribbean, a new United Nations report delivered a sobering warning: The world is failing to prepare for the climate it has already created.
The UN Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2025, aptly titled Running on Empty, finds that developing nations will need between US$310 and $365 billion annually by 2035 to cope with intensifying climate impacts. Yet, international public finance for adaptation fell to just US$26 billion in 2023, down from US$28 billion the previous year. The result: Only one-twelfth of what’s needed is being delivered.
This gap is not an abstract number. It’s visible in the wreckage of homes, farms, and economies across our region. Last month, Hurricane Melissa, the strongest-ever storm to hit Jamaica, tore through the Caribbean, leaving destruction equivalent to nearly 30% of the island’s GDP. With at least 75 lives lost and damages exceeding US$50 billion, Melissa is not just another storm; it is a case study in the cost of global inaction.
A rapid attribution study found that climate change made Melissa four times more likely and increased its wind speeds by 7%, raising damages by around 12%. For Haiti, Jamaica, and other small island developing states (SIDS), such storms bring unbearable losses eroding livelihoods, tourism revenues, and vital infrastructure. These countries contribute the least to global emissions yet bear the highest costs.
Adaptation finance should not create more debt.
The pattern repeats globally. This year’s monsoon floods in Pakistan displaced 7 million people and destroyed thousands of homes. Whether in South Asia or the Caribbean, the message is clear: The failure to invest in adaptation is costing lives.
Adaptation is not a distant goal; it is an urgent necessity. It means building stronger flood defenses, adopting climate-smart agriculture, and developing social protection systems that safeguard the most vulnerable. Research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) shows that every US$1 invested early in resilience saves more than US$5 in avoided losses. Yet, the world continues to spend far more on disaster relief than on prevention.
Every dollar delayed multiplies the human and economic toll. In Haiti, where communities are already grappling with political instability, weak infrastructure, and high poverty, each storm magnifies vulnerabilities. The Caribbean, with its densely populated coastal areas and economies heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, cannot afford to treat adaptation as optional.
At COP29 in Baku, governments pledged through the Baku to Belém Roadmap to mobilize US$1.3 trillion by 2035, including at least US$300 billion annually for developing nations. On paper, this looks ambitious. In reality, it falls far short of what is needed. Adjusted for inflation, adaptation costs could reach US$440-520 billion per year by 2035, and the US$300 billion target covers both mitigation and adaptation, with no separate adaptation goal yet defined.
Adaptation finance was meant to help nations prepare for rising seas, harsher droughts, and lethal floods. Yet, when those funds don’t arrive, countries are forced to borrow. In 2023, 59 least developed countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) paid US$37 billion to service their debts and received only US$32 billion in climate finance. These aren’t productive investments but emergency debts taken just to rebuild what has already been lost.
This is the new face of global inequality: Countries that contributed least to the crisis are being made to pay twice—first through climate impacts, and then through debt. And while the rhetoric of “resilience” fills summit halls, the financial architecture remains rigged against the Global South. Only 15% of adaptation finance in recent years has been delivered as grants; the rest comes as loans. For every dollar of “climate support,” developing nations are paying back many more in interest.
The IIED notes that less than 10% of global climate finance reaches the local level, while international credit rating systems penalize small and vulnerable economies for their exposure to climate risks making it harder for them to attract investment in resilience. These structural barriers are blocking climate justice.
So what should change?
Adaptation finance should not create more debt. Countries hit by climate disasters need grants, not loans, because these crises are caused by global emissions, not their own failures. Second, global lending rules must change. The IMF and World Bank should consider pausing repayments after major disasters. Forcing countries to rebuild while paying high interest is unfair and makes recovery harder. Third, regional cooperation must grow stronger. Shared projects prove that joint action works. Regional funds, supported by concessional finance and local expertise, can deliver faster results than slow global systems.
Adaptation is not charity. It is justice and economic common sense. Without equitable support and reparations, the Global South would sink further and keep on building the same roads and homes after every flood, hurricane, and storm. This is not only senseless but also highly unjust. It is time for the Global North to take responsibility, after all its only fair that the poor and vulnerable shouldn’t have to fix a crisis they didn’t create while drowning in debt.
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Report Shows How to End 'Climate Colonialism' and Ensure a Just Transition for Global South
"A just transition must redistribute power and resources, curb overconsumption, and prioritize dignity and rights for all," Oxfam International stresses in a new report.
Sep 24, 2025
A report published Wednesday details how "climate colonialism" of wealthier nations "hijacks" investment and profits from the Global South—and lays out how the world can "move beyond extractive models and build an energy system rooted in equality, justice, care, and collective prosperity."
The Oxfam International report notes that "the global energy transition stands at a pivotal moment: It can either dismantle the inequalities driving the climate crisis or deepen them. Today, the transition risks reproducing patterns of extractivism and exploitation, with the most marginalized paying the highest price while elites profit."
"From transition mineral mining to debt burdens and unequal energy access, the current trajectory mirrors centuries of colonial injustice," the publication states. "A just transition must redistribute power and resources, curb overconsumption, and prioritize dignity and rights for all."
The report continues:
Today, the warning signs are clear: The global renewable energy transition is being built on unequal foundations. We are witnessing climate inequality inaction: a transition focused on replacing fossil fuels with green alternatives, without questioning the excessive energy use of the richest, while often leaving lower-income communities to bear the greatest costs, including through the harmful impacts of transition mineral mining, inadequate benefit sharing, and global financial and trade systems rigged against their interests. Put simply, the same dynamics that drove historical colonialism are reaemerging in new forms through the green transition.
These patterns of inequality play out both between and within countries. While stark inequalities exist between the richest and poorest within high-income countries too, global inequality is most sharply felt in the Global South, where structural barriers and historic injustices have left entire nations bearing the brunt of the climate crisis and now shouldering the greatest risks in the renewable energy transition.
"Unless the logic underpinning the transition changes, it will continue to replicate the history of extractivism and exploitation," the report warns. "These inequalities intersect with gender, race, class, age, and other marginalized people or groups, meaning that the costs of an unjust transition fall heaviest on Indigenous peoples, Black communities and other racialized groups, women, workers, peasants, and of course young people and future generations."
"This concentration of wealth and power is mirrored in patterns of energy use: A small minority live in extreme luxury and overconsume planetary resources, while others still lack basic electricity," the report's authors wrote. "If just one year’s energy consumption of the wealthiest 1% were redistributed, it could meet the modern energy needs of all the people in the world without electricity seven times over, while redistributing the consumption of the top 10% global energy consumers could meet the needs of the entire Global South nine times over."
The report also highlights how a "colonial financial system" plays a key role in perpetuating injustice, noting that "while rich countries can pour billions into their own clean energy transitions, the Global South is left with rising debt, punishing interest rates, and shrinking fiscal space."
For every #ElectricVehicle that contains about 3kg of cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tesla earns approximately $3,150 in profit. While the DRC government receives less than $10 in royalties and the average miner earns just $7!📢 Read our new report to learn more: oxf.am/3W68E2o
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— Oxfam International (@oxfaminternational.bsky.social) September 24, 2025 at 6:46 AM
According to Oxfam:
In 2024, high-income countries accounted for roughly 50% of global clean energy investment, and China for 29%, while Africa accounted for just 2%, despite sub-Saharan Africa being home to 85% of all the people in the world without electricity. The inequality is not only in where finance flows, but in how much it costs: Clean energy projects in the Global South face interest rates of 9–13.5%, compared with just 3–6% in richer countries, slowing the pace of the transition. These costs are not inevitable—they reflect a system that prices risk through the racialized lens of colonial legacies. The impact is stark: Powering 100,000 people with clean energy costs about $95 million in advanced economies like the UK, but $139 million (45% higher) in emerging economies such as India and $188 million (97% higher) in African countries such as Nigeria.
How does the Global South reclaim its energy future from climate colonialism? According to the report's authors, "Rather than treating the energy future as a race with few winners, we must reimagine it as a shared global project."
"Energy should not be hoarded, withheld, or used as leverage for geopolitical or corporate power," the report advises. "This structural change requires reparative justice: making rich polluters pay, redistributing resources, confronting overconsumption, and prioritizing the rights of those historically excluded while embracing economic models that put equality, well-being, and ecological limits at the center.
"Tackling inequality is both a moral imperative and an effective strategy for climate mitigation," the authors stressed, offering the following recommendations:
- Differentiating transition pathways based on historical responsibility and capacity;
- Working toward more equitable energy consumption;
- Reforming trade, investment, and taxation systems;
- Replacing extractive financial models with debt cancellation, grant-based climate finance, and reparations initiatives;
- Safeguarding communities and nature;
- Democratizing energy governance; and
- Adopting an international mechanism at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to ensure policy coherence and accelerate, consolidate, and achieve a holistic just transition.
The UN conference, or COP30—scheduled to begin November 10 in Belém, Brazil—is set to feature the theme of a just transition as a central agenda item.
"There is no single blueprint for a just transition—it will differ across contexts, shaped by diverse histories, knowledge, and needs," the Oxfam report states. "But all just transitions must share one principle: Energy should serve life, not profit."
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Why Male Suicide Prevention Requires Policy, Not Just Awareness
On this Suicide Prevention Day, the question is whether we will stop treating male suicide as a seasonal headline and start treating it as a preventable epidemic.
Sep 10, 2025
Today is September 10, World Suicide Prevention Day. The hashtags are already out. Politicians are tweeting about “awareness.” Nonprofits are posting hotline numbers. News outlets will run a few stories, maybe a profile of a grieving family or a segment on rising youth anxiety. Communities will hold vigils and light candles. And then, as happens every September, Congress will return to debating budgets that cut the very services that keep people alive.
Suicide has become an annual ritual of shock, treated as if it were a hurricane that blew in unannounced instead of a slow-moving crisis we have been measuring for decades.
Suicide is not weather. It is not random. It is patterned, predictable, and preventable. Rates climb where jobs collapse and housing becomes unstable. They spread where guns are plentiful and mental healthcare is scarce. They grow in cultures that equate vulnerability with weakness. And they accelerate when elected officials strip away the programs that keep people from falling over the edge.
I know the consequences of silence. My father died by suicide when I was young. For more than a decade, I did not know how he died. My family believed silence could protect me. But silence also isolates, leaving questions that cannot be asked and grief that cannot be named. That fog never fully lifts. It is a reminder that behind every statistic is a family that carries loss forward, often without words for it.
That loss is now multiplied across nearly 50,000 American families each year. Almost 50,000 people died by suicide in 2022—the highest number ever recorded—and nearly 50,000 again in 2023. That is one death every 11 minutes. Three out of four were men. Men are half the country yet nearly 80% of its suicides. The rate for men over 85 is the highest of any group, 15 times higher than women of the same age. Middle-aged men follow close behind, especially in rural counties where work has dried up, institutions have withered, and guns are everywhere. Even among younger men, suicide remains a leading cause of death.
The methods matter. More than half of suicides now involve a firearm. Men are far more likely than women to use a gun, and that choice often makes the difference between an attempt and a death. A gun is immediate and almost always fatal. A moment of despair becomes permanent because the tool at hand was designed to be permanent. Where lethal means are easy and care is scarce, brief despair turns irreversible. States with higher gun ownership have higher suicide rates. The connection is not mysterious. It is arithmetic.
Suicide is not inevitable. It rises when supports are stripped and stigma is reinforced.
Economics tell the same story. Men who lose jobs, homes, or the ability to provide are at higher risk. One national study found that more than 1 in 5 men aged 45 to 64 who died by suicide had recently lost a job, faced eviction, or been buried by debt. When a man’s sense of worth is tied to being a provider, losing that role can feel like losing his reason to live. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called these “deaths of despair,” and the label fits. But despair is not destiny. Raise the minimum wage, expand tax credits, stabilize housing, and suicides among working-class men decline. Let wages stagnate, strip away safety nets, and suicides rise. If despair tracks wages and rent, then budgets decide who lives long enough to get help.
Budgets are moral documents. In 2025, the Trump administration proposed cutting more than a billion dollars from the nation’s main mental health agency. That means fewer clinics, fewer treatment teams, fewer crisis counselors. The same budget threatened to scrap parts of the 988 crisis line, including its LGBTQ youth service. At the Department of Education, $1 billion in school counselor grants was pulled back, leaving rural districts that had finally hired mental health staff facing layoffs. Insurance rules that would have forced companies to cover therapy on par with physical health were paused. On homelessness, the administration reversed Housing First, vowing instead to sweep encampments, force treatment, and “bring back asylums.” Each of these choices falls hardest on men. When Medicaid is cut, when housing supports vanish, when community clinics close, the men most in need are left to cycle through emergency rooms, jails, or morgues.
Policy failures meet cultural stigma. Only about a third of men say they would seek professional help if depressed, compared to nearly 60% of women. The rest say they would handle it on their own, or not at all. That reluctance is reinforced by leaders and influencers. US President Donald Trump once suggested veterans with PTSD “aren’t strong.” Andrew Tate tells millions of young men that “depression isn’t real.” Jordan Peterson blames despair on feminism and political correctness. These voices frame pain as weakness, recast systemic causes as personal failings, and tell men that asking for help makes them lesser. For someone already on the edge, that message can be lethal.
And when suicide is mentioned in politics, it is often weaponized rather than addressed. Commentators invoke male suicide to claim that society only cares about women or minorities. Lawmakers cite “what’s happening to our boys” while voting against Medicaid expansion or school mental health funding. Grievance substitutes for prevention. The fire is pointed to, then the water is cut.
The alternative is straightforward, if not simple. Treat the 988 crisis line like 911: permanent, funded, universal. Expand Medicaid and enforce insurance parity so therapy is covered like any other medical need. Keep counselors in schools. Invest in housing with voluntary supports. Build mobile crisis teams so despair meets a trained counselor, not a police squad. And meet men where they are: union halls, barber shops, job sites, veterans’ groups.
We know this works. In Colorado, “Man Therapy” has used humor and direct language to reach men who would never otherwise consider counseling. Veterans’ peer networks reduce stigma and improve follow-through on care. In Australia, the “Men’s Shed” movement has built thousands of local spaces where older men gather, work on projects, and informally support one another—a model credited with reducing isolation and depression. These are not small-scale experiments. They are blueprints for national policy.
Suicide is not inevitable. It rises when supports are stripped and stigma is reinforced. It falls when care is reachable, affordable, and treated as normal. My father’s death remains a personal loss. But the broader crisis is a collective choice. We know the patterns. We know the risks. We know the solutions. What remains is whether policymakers are willing to act on them.
On this Suicide Prevention Day, the question is not whether we will keep raising awareness. It is whether we will stop treating male suicide as a seasonal headline and start treating it as a preventable epidemic. If policymakers can count the dead, they can also count the votes that decide whether men keep dying at this scale. The choice is not between silence and hashtags. It is between burying another 50,000 next year—or building a country where men live long enough to be heard.
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