Record Global Temperatures, Record Global Debt!
New report flips the script on who owes whom in the global fight for climate repair.
June 5, 2026 marks 54 years since the establishment of World Environment Day — a reminder that the impacts of our warming planet are international.
From rising utility fees to wars over oil or mass migration driven by natural disasters, the need for global solidarity to confront climate catastrophe has never been more urgent. Countries in the Global North must acknowledge the disproportionate burden countries in the Global South are forced to bear, even as these same countries are the lowest carbon emitters. But what power do we, as ordinary people, have to demand a transformative response to climate change?
Debt Collective founders and our allies are answering this question in a recently released report, which amplifies vital strategies used by social movements around the world to resist unjust debt and climate change in the same frame. Please enjoy the below excerpt from the report, From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing and the Fight for Climate Repair, and be sure to share far and wide!
The Unequal Burden of Climate Change in an Era of Record Fossil Fuel Profits
The impacts of climate change are arriving much faster than predicted, and the costs are much higher too. Every time a catastrophic hurricane, flood, wildfire, drought, or heatwave leaves a trail of devastation, we are told how much damage, in dollar amounts, it caused, and what portion of GDP that represents. But these sums typically only reflect loss of property and infrastructure, not the costs of recovery and displacement. Nor do they account for the collateral, or indirect, damage that economists call “externalities”; pollution, species extinction, crop failure, soil and water degradation, loss of flora that act as carbon sinks, etc. Above all, they do not give us an honest picture of the uneven impacts of the damage. Frontline communities with the lowest incomes and the least protection suffer much more than well-heeled households with the resources to insulate and insure themselves. The damage to the former is often immeasurable, which is why the media may report that floods in Bangladesh left tens of millions of people homeless, but that floods in Southeastern Europe caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.
More tellingly, these statistics are hardly ever put side by side with the numbers showing the profits posted by the fossil fuel corporations that are most directly responsible for climate change. Until 2024 and 2025, 2023 was the hottest year in our planet’s recorded history. That same year, U.S.-based oil and gas companies earned $172.8 billion, took back previous pledges to decrease their fossil fuel output that warms our planet, and used tax dollars (in other words, public money and not their own profits) to increase oil and gas production. The year before — 2022 — the six largest Western oil companies made over $200 billion dollars in profit, more money than in any other year in the industry’s history. ExxonMobil alone — the energy company in strongest opposition to decarbonization — made nearly $56 billion and saw its share price rise more than 50%. BP — the energy company that has led industry decarbonization efforts — reversed course on its “beyond Petroleum” initiative, announcing that it would slow its transition plans toward renewable energy generation.
In response, investors poured money into BP, whose stock price rose 10% in the 48 hours after the firm’s announcement. The world’s largest banks continue to fund this dramatic expansion in fossil fuel production, much of it destined for exports to global south countries that cannot afford to fund their own transition to a low-carbon economy. Despite agreements ranging from the 2015 Paris Accords to 2021’s Net Zero Banking Alliance, the top 60 banks globally have committed $3.3 trillion to companies expanding fossil fuels since 2016.
As the world’s largest banks and energy companies scramble to increase their investments in fossil fuels, frontline communities all over the world are disproportionately paying the price. Poor people who are geographically vulnerable are living with, and dying from, the most violent effects of climate change. These communities are the least responsible for climate change and yet they are most impacted. Why? As this paper will go on to detail, the answer has a lot to do with the financial system that enriches fossil fuel companies and their investors while it burdens so much of the rest of the world not only with the violent and destructive effects of climate change, but also with crushing levels of debt.
Just as the temperatures hit record highs, so, too has total global debt, reaching $315 trillion in the first quarter of 2024. Most of that debt is held by corporations and investors, who use the capital to create even more wealth for themselves. But most of the burden falls on those who cannot afford to repay, and whose poverty only deepens as a result, even within the world’s wealthiest countries, where class, race and gender inequalities push people underwater. Just under one-fifth of that $315 trillion represents household debt owed by ordinary people, not cities, countries, or corporations. How much of that sum is entangled with the ruinous impacts of climate change? The business practices of the fossil fuel industry, and the banks, private equity firms, and other major asset managers who fund them have imposed these financial costs on us. And not only our reliance on oil and gas, but also our day-to-day debts, from housing to healthcare, enrich these same companies and financial institutions.
Faced with the might of the world’s largest banks, energy companies and stock markets, what financial leverage do ordinary people have to push for decarbonization and a reparative energy transition? The challenge of combating climate change is so big that ordinary people can seem powerless to confront it. Indeed, when we talk about the challenges of climate justice organizing, we usually talk about how much material power fossil fuel companies or big banks or private equity companies have, and how their influence over our elected officials is arguably the biggest roadblock to transformative climate practice and policy. Can ordinary people wield that level of systemic financial power too? This is one of the questions we set out to answer in this paper.
Who Owes Whom? The Power of Organized Debtors
At the Debt Collective we have one potential answer to that question: regular people around the world actually possess that latent power through our own household debts and relationships to big banks, and we can mobilize it through the collective strength of debtors’ unions, tenants unions, and labor unions working together. We’ll explore that idea later in the paper, but we introduce it here to make the point that while debt is most often understood as a burden and a form of disempowerment, it can also be a form of power!
Fossil fuel companies know the wealth-creating capacity of debt all too well, making full use of more than $6.9 trillion of debt financing since the 2015 signing of the Paris Agreement. In fact, these companies use debt financing to escape the scrutiny they face from activists and regulators on the stock market, and to avoid paying taxes. At the same time, fossil fuel companies have benefited from more than $4.7 trillion in government subsidies, which help guarantee lucrative prices and revenues for their industry. Avoiding taxes while benefiting from such lavish financial support, these companies should be understood as major contributors to government debt, so often evoked to justify cuts to public spending: austerity for we the people, government-backed riches for the fossil fuel industry.
The idea that debt obligations are central to the climate crisis is not new. There is increasing consensus that debt and the climate crisis are interconnected — and that the relationship between them lies at the heart of what is known as the climate justice movement. This paper begins from this consensus and then asks, What are the transformative ideas and organizing strategies that flow from this understanding? What are debt and climate justice movements around the world doing to build power at this intersection?
In these pages you’ll find dispatches from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, South Africa’s Green Revolutionary Council, the Ni Una Menos and Don’t Pay UK movements, Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development, and more!
Each and every one of these movements — whether explicitly or otherwise — uses what is called a climate reparations framework. Climate reparations looks at the centuries of exploitative relationships between the global north and global south (slavery, colonization, indigenous genocide, resource and labor extraction), and shows that wealthy, industrialized nations owe a debt to poorer countries, peoples, and lands. Climate reparations is the idea that “wealthy, industrialized nations should pay to mitigate the climate emergency, which they caused and which disproportionately affects poorer countries.”
To us and to so many other social movements, the situation is clear. We have to flip the script on who owes what to whom. Climate changers — the governments, corporations, and other institutions who have changed the climate — are the ones who should be on the hook. Their obligation to repair the damage they have caused is indisputable, and that is why we describe their responsibility in terms of an obligation to repay. But it is also clear that our current financial system is not set up to flip this script, so that system needs to be radically rethought and remade, and we do our best to tackle that in this paper as well.
Organizing for climate reparations means centering the analysis, strategies and tactics emerging from the global south — the frontlines of climate/debt struggle from South Africa to Brazil, the Philippines to Argentina to Barbados. By that same token, it also means recognizing that the rich nations of North America and Europe — while they also contain marginalized frontline communities — are the world’s largest carbon emitters (taking historical emissions into account — a list to which China was recently added), and the regions whose financial power, energy consumption, development policies and money (the US Dollar in particular) dictate global financial architectures, at least for now.
Unjust Debt, Disobedience and Climate Justice
While we do our best to summarize the great thinking already out there, especially on sovereign debt and climate change, this paper offers a few new insights as well. First, as the relationship between debt and climate change has become more widely understood, many global activist movements and global governance forums approach debt either as a constraint on poor countries (who cannot afford to invest in climate mitigation or adaptation, for instance) or a moral obligation of rich countries (who owe climate debt and reparations). While these understandings are very important, they are not the only formats for thinking about climate debts, nor are they the only pathways for resolving them. As we’ll explore with social movements in Section III, debt can also be a form of counterpower — providing consequential means for collective disobedience and leverage to force reparations, reparative public goods, and definancialization.
Second, debt affects people’s daily lives across multiple scales. While the relationship between sovereign debt and climate change is now a well-established feature of elite commentary, there has been much less attention to how municipal debt and household debt are determined by climate change impacts, and how each can be affected by the other. Municipalities are forced to take on more debt to offset the infrastructural damage from floods and storms, while the costs of repayment are passed on disproportionately in the form of taxes and reduced services to the most vulnerable communities. An ever larger share of household debt comes from unpayable energy bills, soaring insurance premiums and auto loan notes, and rapidly increasing prices for food items produced through high-carbon processes.
At the Debt Collective, we have a track record of organizing the collective power of debtors to refuse unjust or illegitimate debts. Climate debt, for most of us, falls into this category. Unlike most debts levied for access to social goods that should be freely available, it is a debt that should be paid, but only by the climate changers themselves. We hope that readers will be persuaded that our actions, as a debtors union of households, could add this new dimension of pressure to ensure a fair and just outcome.
Adapted from the report: From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing and the Fight for Climate Repair by Maizah Ali, Hannah Appel, Erik Hazard, Andrew Ross and Matt Schneider, published Winter 2026. Copyright © 2026 by UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Institute on Inequality and Democracy. All rights reserved.