Investigation by Guardian and Carbon Brief finds just a fifth of funds to fight global heating went to poorest 44 countries
China and wealthy petrostates including Saudi Arabia and UAE are among countries receiving large sums of climate finance, according to an analysis.
The Guardian and Carbon Brief analysed previously unreported submissions to the UN, along with data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), that show how billions of dollars of public money is being committed to the fight against global heating.
The investigation found a broadly functioning system that shifts capital from rich polluters to vulnerable nations, helping them clean their economies and adapt to a hotter world.
But it also found that because the distribution of the largest part of the funds had no central oversight and was entirely at the discretion of individual countries, it was subject to political interests and not always directed where it was most needed.
Although official data is not extensive enough to trace all the recipients of climate finance, the Guardian analysis found that about a fifth of the funding in 2021 and 2022 went to the world’s 44 poorest countries, known as the least developed countries (LDCs). Much of that was in the form of loans, rather than grants.
Some LDCs received more than two-thirds of their climate finance in the form of loans, whose repayment terms can push governments further into debt traps. The share of loans rose to 95% or more in the cases of Bangladesh and Angola.
Most of the world’s developed countries provide finance to support climate action in developing ones, bilaterally and through multilateral organisations such as development banks. At a UN summit in Copenhagen in 2009, rich countries promised to mobilise $100bn (£76bn) a year by 2020 in recognition of their greater responsibility for climate breakdown and ability to fund solutions.
But the analysis of the most recent submissions, covering more than 20,000 global projects during 2021 and 2022 – the year in which the Copenhagen target was belatedly met, found that vast sums were going to petrostates, as well as to China, the world’s second-largest economy.
UAE, a fossil fuel exporter with a GDP per capita on a par with France and Canada, received more than $1bn in loans from Japan that were logged as climate finance. The projects include $625m for an offshore electricity transmission project in Abu Dhabi and $452m for a waste incinerator in Dubai.
On the one hand, our government sends them paltry amounts of foreign aid. On the other, to take only one example, Canadian investment in African mining ventures, many of them deeply destructive to locals, are often actively promoted by Canadian politicians and bureaucrats
Gerald Caplan is an Africa scholar, a former NDP national director and a regular panelist on CBC's Power & Politics.
According to the New York Times, Donald Trump's transition team wanted to know: "Why should we spend funds on Africa when we are suffering here in the U.S.?" Curiously enough, most Americans probably would have agreed with Mr. Trump that this was a real question. But they all share an entirely false premise.
America and the rest of the rich world have actually been ripping off Africa for the past 700 years, ever since the Portuguese began the slave trade, all the while insisting that Africa has been the beneficiary of this relentless exploitation. It's been one of the great hoaxes of the past millennium.
Slavery and the slave trade, upon which Western Europe and the United States developed their economic superiority, were said to be positive for Africans, whose innate inferiority meant they had no capacity to run their own lives.
For subscribers: China's African retreat: How a once-celebrated relationship turned cold
Read more: African Union's mass withdrawal strategy mounts pressure on ICC
Colonialism, in turn, was the West's ostensibly philanthropic attempt to gift Africa with "Christianity, Civilization and Commerce," in return for making possible Europe's assorted empires.
Neocolonialsm, which has operated for the past 65 years since the West first "gave" their African colonies freedom, is the stage we have all lived through. During this period, according to Western mythology, Africa has been the problem to which the generosity of the rich world is the solution. You know – a goat at Christmas, the "adoption" of an unknown child, meagre foreign aid and neoliberal economic policies.
In reality, Africa is far more generous to the West than we are to it. That was evident from the first. But beginning in 1973, with the publication of the ground-breaking book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Guyanese academic-activist Walter Rodney, the European fairy tale was definitively exploded. The title said it all: Africa's multiple woes were a function of deliberate policies of exploitation by Europe's colonial regimes.
Since then, despite mounting evidence, mass ignorance in the West, cultivated by both elites and aid agencies, remained dominant. Yet excellent research by sophisticated NGOs have made indisputably clear the manifold ways in which foreign interests consistently ripped off African countries, not least through tax evasion and the investment privileges gained by Western corporate interests.
I myself jumped into this attempt to demystify Africa-West relations with a book called The Betrayal of Africa. The betrayers were Western governments and corporate interests, often in collusion with African elites. The betrayed were innocents in the West and of course the African people.
More exposés pour forth, the latest, probably most comprehensive one, just this December. The U.S.-based Global Financial Integrity examined all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor ones each year, including aid, foreign investment and trade flows, as well as debt cancellation, workers' remittances and unrecorded capital flight.
The conclusion was categorical: The flow of money from rich countries to poor countries, including most of Africa, pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.
In 2012, the last year of recorded data, poor countries received a total of $1.3-trillion (U.S.), including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3-trillion flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2-trillion more to the rest of the world than they received. Since 1980, these net outflows add up to a staggering total of $16.3 trillion. That's how much money has been bled out of the global south, including Africa, over the past few decades.
And yes, it's trillions.
Add in the massive corruption, enabled by Western interests, plus the violent coups and conflicts that Western interests facilitated, and there's only one conclusion: Rich countries aren't developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.
Canada is a pretty good example. On the one hand, our governments sends them paltry amounts of foreign aid. On the other, to take only one example, Canadian investment in African mining ventures, many of them deeply destructive to locals, are often actively promoted by Canadian politicians and bureaucrats.
The Trudeau government is looking for a new Africa strategy. Surely telling the truth about who is ripping off whom would be a very constructive way to begin. Then the appropriate policies could, at long last, follow. Or is the truth now too much for Canada, too?
