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global south
The Climate Crisis Demands Youth Leadership—And We Must Provide It
The leaders of tomorrow are already here, working to solve the problems that older generations have failed to address. Now, it’s time to support them.
Mar 19, 2025
The stereotype that youth-led climate initiatives are too risky to fund is outdated and, in fact, severely limits the opportunities for talented young entrepreneurs and activists. It stifles the very innovation needed to create a sustainable future. As we grapple with the pressing realities of the climate crisis, it is no longer a matter of whether we should support young leaders; it’s a matter of urgency. To succeed in addressing our environmental challenges, we need to tap into the energy, creativity, and bold leadership that young people bring to the table.
When I was just 16 years old, I submitted a climate research paper to the United Nations Development Program in Pakistan. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of working with global organizations, speaking on CNN about the devastating impact of climate change in my home country, and leading the transformation of a college club into a full-fledged nonprofit. These experiences have shown me firsthand how young people are not just passionate about environmental change—they are driving it.
Yet, despite their passion and fresh ideas, youth-led environmental action remains massively underfunded. Less than 1% of institutional climate funding currently goes toward young people. Many, like myself, have struggled to secure the necessary resources to bring our ideas to life. As the next generation holds the key to solving the climate crisis, failing to support these leaders only exacerbates the problem. The global climate crisis is urgent, and so is the need to empower young people with the funding, mentorship, and platforms they need.
We know time is running out to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis. If we are to truly address it, we must fund and support young activists today.
I’ve seen this challenge play out in my own journey. As a student in London, I faced challenges from being a woman of color trying to secure funding and support for environmental initiatives. Back in Pakistan, while I’ve been able to push forward with awareness campaigns and advocacy, I’ve encountered plenty of hurdles—whether it’s dealing with politicians who don’t take me seriously or navigating security concerns because of my public activism. Despite these challenges, I remain convinced that the future of climate change solutions lies in the hands of young people—especially women.
Supporting youth-driven solutions is not just about giving young people opportunities—it’s about ensuring our movement is more inclusive, diverse, and effective. Young leaders have the ability to solve problems that older generations may not recognize. I founded the Climate Action Society at University College London, a project that eventually became an international nonprofit. The key to its success was understanding that leadership doesn’t come with age—it comes from a commitment to action and collaboration. The support we received, including recognition from the United Nations and the U.K. Government, was crucial in amplifying our impact.
One of many initiatives directly addressing the need to support youth-led climate solutions is The Iris Prize by The Iris Project, an international award that celebrates and funds young environmental stewards dedicated to catalyzing climate action in their communities. Fiscally hosted by the Global Fund for Children, The Iris Prize invites young people aged 16-24 who are actively protecting local ecosystems, restoring natural habitats, and driving community-based environmental efforts to showcase their innovative ideas and solutions for a sustainable future.
The awards aim to help close the funding gap by shining a light on the action young people are already taking to protect and restore nature, and the lives of those working to defend their environment. Beyond financial support, winners also receive climate communications training, organizational development training, and mentorship, equipping them with the resources they need to increase their impact and scale their projects.
The funds have supported a range of projects, such as revitalising ecosystems in Bolivia, training women in sustainable farming in Guatemala, and addressing pollution in Sierra Leone. These projects are having a real impact on communities, and supporting them through funding will go a long way in helping them scale that impact. At a time when global philanthropic funding has been cut, putting pressure on hundreds of organizations in the global South, funding grassroots initiatives is more important than ever.
As someone who has worked tirelessly in climate activism, I have seen how young people are already changing the world through their grassroots efforts. However, without the support of initiatives like The Iris Prize and others, many of these projects will struggle to scale and reach their full potential.
The global community must shift its mindset. If we are to make a real, lasting difference, we must embrace youth-led initiatives as central to our global strategy. The leaders of tomorrow are already here, working to solve the problems that older generations have failed to address. Now, it’s time to support them.
We know time is running out to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis. If we are to truly address it, we must fund and support young activists today. The future depends on it. Through initiatives like The Iris Prize and others, we can ensure that youth-led solutions not only thrive but are scaled for maximum impact. Let’s give these innovators the funding and resources to make the change we desperately need.
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If DOGE Wants a Worthy Target, It Should Look at the World Bank and IMF
These are two of the most questionable and controversial institutions directly or indirectly funded with U.S. taxpayers’ money.
Feb 25, 2025
I think that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have been misinformed. I don’t disagree with their shutting down USAID, but I think it’s rather small fry. There are much, much bigger fish to fry if you want to really save U.S. government money that is being wasted in programs that are mischievously justified as aid to the poor people of the world.
Elon, hear me out: if you walk northwest from your headquarters at the Eisenhower Executive Building along Pennsylvania Avenue, you’ll come after one long block upon two ugly buildings squatting beside each other. One is the World Bank. The other is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). You can actually just walk in and demand to look at their books since they are extensions of the U.S. government. And you would have a very good reason to do so, since these are two of the most questionable and controversial institutions directly or indirectly funded with U.S. taxpayers’ money.
The IMF and the World Bank are monuments to misguided economic thinking and policies that have brought much misery to the peoples of the Global South.
Let me start with the World Bank, which is located at 1818 H St NW. This institution has so-called development projects throughout the Global South, otherwise known as developing countries. This agency says that its mission is to end poverty in the developing world. To fulfill this goal, its lending has risen from nearly $55 billion in 2015 to $117.5 billion in 2024. Yet, despite this massive increase, the bank admits that global poverty reduction “has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020-2030 set to be a lost decade.” Some 3.5 billion people, or 44% of the globe, remain poor, after decades of massive World Bank lending. And a major part of the reason is that World Bank programs have created poverty instead of alleviating it.
Living in Luxury While “Fighting Poverty”
To manage its operations, the Bank’s full-time staff rose from nearly 12,000 in 2015 to over 13,000 in 2023. These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. If one includes all employees—permanent, non-permanent, contractual, part-time—throughout the world, the bank employs close to 41,000 people. The vast majority, 26,000, or 63%, work out of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., and only 3,200 are located in Africa, where most people in extreme poverty live.
The Bank’s economists and top administrators are among the highest paid financial functionaries in the world, which explains the reason why the bank is a major cause of the brain drain from developing countries: a great number of highly trained economists from developing countries prefer to work at the bank instead of their home countries, with some going straight from Ivy League or British graduate schools to Washington, D.C. Many within the bank and the International Monetary Fund complain about the “South Asian Mafia” that they claim controls employment opportunities for economists and higher-level staff in the two organizations.
The World Bank has come under fire for the billions it has spent supporting fossil-fuel projects throughout the Third World that have contributed to global warming and to mega-dam projects that have displaced millions. The bank, along with the fund, has also gained notoriety for imposing “structural adjustment” programs guided by the radical principles of the “Washington Consensus” that are designed to promote globalization but have, instead, increased poverty and deepened inequality. The reason World Bank projects and programs don’t work or create exactly the opposite of their intended goals is because they are based on questionable propositions built on little or no empirical evidence. An assessment made a few years ago by an all-star team of renowned economists led by Princeton’s Angus Deaton, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, was damning:
[The] panel had substantial criticisms of the way that the research was used to proselytize on behalf of bank policy, often without taking a balanced view, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that is favorable to bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of checks and balances that should have separated advocacy and research. The panel endorses the right of the bank to strongly defend and advocate its own policies. But when the bank leadership selectively appeals to relatively new and untested research as hard evidence that these preferred policies work, it lends unwarranted confidence to the bank’s prescriptions. Placing fragile selected new research results on a pedestal invites later recrimination that undermines the credibility and usefulness of all bank research.
The bank’s refusal to acknowledge real-world refutations of its pro-globalization advocacy and its unbalanced, one-sided research led to justifiable rejection of its advice by the people who were suffering from the policies it was implementing, confessed Paul Collier, head of the Research Development Department of the Bank from 1998 to 2003:
The profession has been unprofessional, fearful that any criticism would strengthen populism, so that little work has been done on the downsides of these different processes [of globalization]. Yet the downsides were apparent to ordinary citizens, and the effect of economists appearing to dismiss them has resulted in widespread refusal of people to listen to “experts.” For my profession to reestablish credibility we must provide a more balanced analysis, in which the downsides are acknowledged and properly evaluated with a view to designing policy responses that address them. The profession may be better served by mea culpa than by further indignant defenses of globalization.
Despite the high rate of failure of its lending programs acknowledged in internal World Bank assessments, the World Bank administrative budget that supports the high salaries of its economists and other high-level staff just keeps growing. The World Bank (IBRD/IDA) administrative budget was approved at $3.5 billion for FY25, a sizable rise from the $3.1 billion authorized for FY 2024, with no convincing reason at all.
The IMF and the Art of Worsening Financial Crises
The International Monetary Fund, whose address is 700 19th St NW, is the World Bank’s sister agency. It has a full-time staff of 3,100, supported by a budget of $1.5 billion. The IMF’s economists are paid even higher than those at the World Bank, and they evoke more fear, hatred, and contempt than the Bank.
The IMF has an equally controversial history. It has a record of coming in to supposedly assist developing economies in crisis, only to make things worse. Its greatest debacle and scandal was its performance during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, when the so-called “tiger economies “of the East and Southeast Asia were destabilized by the massive inflows and outflows of foreign portfolio investment.
The fund was heavily criticized on three counts. First, it had encouraged the governments of the region to eliminate capital controls, thus provoking uncontrolled capital flows. Second, it assembled multi-billion dollar “rescue packages” that went to rescue not the people suffering from the crisis but to compensate the foreign financial speculators that had lost millions in dubious speculative ventures, thus encouraging “moral hazard,” or irresponsible investing. Third, its measures to stabilize the damaged economies intensified the crisis, since instead of encouraging government spending to counteract the collapse of private sector, it told the governments to radically cut spending, leading to a “procyclical” negative synergy that ended in deep recession.
So long as the IMF is there, the big international banks will assume that they will be bailed out for making irresponsible loans.
In just a few weeks, 1 million people in Thailand and 22 million in Indonesia fell below the poverty line. The only country that contained the crisis was Malaysia, which refused to follow the fund’s dictates and imposed capital and currency controls
So disastrous were the IMF’s interventions that George Schultz, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Treasury, called for its abolition for encouraging moral hazard, and prominent economists like Jagdish Bhagwati and Jeffrey Sachs accused it of provoking global macroeconomic instability. Indeed, a rare conservative-liberal alliance in the U.S. Congress came within a hair’s breath of denying the IMF a $14.5 billion replenishment.
Eventually, the fund was forced to admit that the “thrust of fiscal policy… turned out to be substantially different… because the original assumptions for economic growth, capital flows, and exchange rates… were proved drastically wrong.” But things were never the same again. The IMF was so reviled for its performance that Asian governments developed IMF-phobia, swearing never again to ask the IMF for rescue even in the most dire circumstances. For instance, after paying off what Thailand owed the IMF, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared the country “liberated” from the fund in 2004.
Instead of learning from its debacle during the Asian Financial Crisis, the IMF stumbled into another fiasco more than a decade later, during the Global Financial Crisis. It allowed itself to be hijacked by Germany, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank to provide billions of public money to rescue German financial institutions and investors that had engaged in an orgy of irresponsible lending to Greece to the tune of 25 billion euros. To get the so-called rescue funds, the Greek government, like the Asian governments previously, was forced to adopt severe austerity measures that drove unemployment up to 28% and condemned the Greek economy to permanent stagnation, only to turn the money it was ostensibly receiving over to the German banks.
Not surprisingly, so long as the IMF is there, the big international banks will assume that they will be bailed out for making irresponsible loans.
The U.S. and the Bretton Woods Twins: Fiction and Fact
There is a fiction that the IMF and World Bank are multilateral institutions that are owned by their many member governments. The reality is that the United States controls both institutions, with a 17.4% share of total quotas at the fund and 15.8% share of voting power at the bank. These shares give the U.S. government a veto power over any policy change. But the truth is that U.S. power is not limited to its being able to veto policy decisions it does not like. No country would dare oppose a move by the United States to radically cut the administrative budgets (by, say, 75% initially) and the number of personnel in the two organizations (to 600 personnel each, as in the case of USAID) if it wanted to do so. All it needs to do to get its way is to threaten to withhold its contributions to the two organizations. I can guarantee that immediately the interest rate at which the bank borrows in international capital markets would leap upward, paralyzing its lending operations.
The IMF and the World Bank are monuments to misguided economic thinking and policies that have brought much misery to the peoples of the Global South. They are institutions that no longer serve any purpose except to perpetuate and enlarge themselves. If Elon Musk and Donald Trump are really serious about radically downsizing bloated bureaucracies, they could not have better targets than the Bretton Woods twins.
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The Global South Needs Fair, Equitable, and Enduring Climate Finance
While the developed world is rapidly changing its relationship with the rest of the world, the price of not providing climate finance will be economic losses, health impacts, increased disaster costs, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and infrastructural damage.
Feb 17, 2025
The global commitment to fair climate finance is at a crossroads. COP29 concluded with a disappointing New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance, or NCQG, leaving developing nations at risk of being left behind. With the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris agreement and slashing development aid, prospects for more ambitious fair climate finance are disappearing out of sight. Decisions like these not only threaten global cooperation on climate change but will also fail to meet its core purpose in supporting the most affected communities in adapting to and mitigating climate change. Now, more than ever, fair and equitable climate finance—such as increased grant-based funding and debt relief—is critical.
In Africa, the impacts of climate change are stark and undeniable. Extreme weather events on the continent surged from 85 in the 1970s to over 540 between 2010 and 2019, causing over 730,000 deaths and $38.5 billion in damages. The increasing frequency and severity of floods, droughts, and storms are threatening food security, displacing populations, and putting immense stress on water resources. According to the World Bank, climate change could push up to 118 million extremely poor people in Africa into abject poverty by 2030 as drought, floods, and extreme heat intensify. A stark reality that underscores the urgent need for robust climate finance to implement adaptation and mitigation strategies to safeguard and secure the continent's future.
Without stronger commitments to public grants and additional funding, developing countries risk falling into a cycle of debt that hinders climate action.
At the same time, climate response remains critically underfunded in Africa. From the figures released by the Climate Policy Initiative, the continent will need approximately $2.8 trillion between 2020 and 2030 to implement its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. However, current annual climate finance flows to Africa are only $30 billion, exposing a significant funding gap for climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Climate Finance at COP29
COP29's main objective was to deliver on a finance goal that would see the world off the tipping point. However, after two weeks of nearly failed climate diplomacy, negotiators agreed to a disappointing $300 billion annually by 2035. This amount falls short of the $1.3 trillion per year figure, supported by the Needs Determinant Report, that many developing countries had advocated for.
Nevertheless, the Baku to Belem Roadmap has been developed to address the climate finance gap. This framework, set to be finalized at COP30 in Brazil, offers a crucial opportunity to refine finance mechanisms to effectively and equitably meet the needs of developing countries.
Why the Finance Outcome of COP29 Could Leave Developing Countries Behind
Beyond the insufficient funding, the NCQG lacks a strong commitment to equity, a key principle of the Paris agreement. The principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) emphasizes that developed countries should bear a greater share of the financial burden. However, the NCQG merely states that developed nations would "take the lead" in mobilizing $300 billion, reflecting a lack of firm commitment.
A major concern is the climate debt trap for developing nations. Much of the climate finance provided is in the form of loans rather than grants, worsening existing debt burdens and limiting investments in sustainable development. Without stronger commitments to public grants and additional funding, developing countries risk falling into a cycle of debt that hinders climate action.
Moving Forward: Shaping Conditions for Fair, Equitable, and Enduring Climate Finance
To ensure COP29's finance outcomes do not leave the Global South behind, several actions are needed.
Firstly, debt relief is crucial. Approximately 60% of low-income countries are already in or near debt distress. Between 2016 and 2020, 72% of climate finance to developing nations was in loans, while only 26% was in grants. Reducing debt burdens would allow developing countries to allocate more resources to climate projects, improve fiscal stability, and attract additional investments.
Similarly, given the mounting climate finance debts in low-income developing countries, increased grant-based financing for climate action is needed. In 2022, developed countries provided around $115.9 billion in climate finance to developing countries, but a significant portion was in the form of loans. Heavy reliance on debt-based financing exacerbates financial burdens on these nations. Grant-based finance, on the other hand, aligns with equity principles and ensures that funding effectively supports adaptation and mitigation.
Another potential path is leveraging private sector investment. The private sector plays an essential role in climate finance. However, its involvement often prioritizes profit over genuine climate benefits. Strategies must ensure that private investments align with climate justice principles. To address this, approaches are needed such as those used by Bill and Melinda Gates.
Lastly, implementing robust governance and transparent mechanisms is critical. This includes developing detailed reporting templates, public participation in decision-making, and clear monitoring systems to track climate finance flows and prevent double counting.
While the developed world is rapidly changing its relationship with the rest of the world from aid to trade, the price of not providing equitable, grant-based, public climate finance will be economic losses, health impacts, increased disaster costs, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and infrastructural damage. Quite simply, taking the equity conditions into account is the way forward if we are to ensure that the outcomes of COP29 leave no low-income developing nation in the Global South behind.
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