Why the Global South Pays for the North’s Carbon Legacy
Article by May N.
When Cyclone Idai tore through Mozambique in 2019, it demolished nearly 90 percent of Beira’s houses in under an hour, displacing half a million people and killing more than 1,300, all in a country contributing just 0.03 percent of global emissions .(1) Across the globe in Hamburg, Germany, flood barriers held firm during the same storm, sparing countless lives and property.(2) That night, geography meant the difference between catastrophe and safety, a stark portrait of global inequality in climate vulnerability.
This isn’t coincidence or bad luck; it’s the product of systemic injustice. The Global North, responsible for around 70 percent of historical greenhouse gases, built wealth on coal, oil, and carbon .(3) Meanwhile, the Global South, contributing less than 20 percent of emissions, suffers rising seas, crippling heatwaves, and economic devastation. Rural communities in Mozambique and Bangladesh lose homes and crops. Low‑wage workers in India and Central America endure heat so brutal it kills hundreds annually.(4) Backed by subsidies totaling over $700 billion in 2022, Northern governments still prop up fossil fuel industries. (5)
Consider Manila, where 47 devastating typhoons have struck since 2000, fueled by warming ocean temperatures.(6) Meanwhile, in the same decade, Colorado has endured wildfires so intense they’ve wiped out entire towns, exposing long-standing racial and rural neglect in emergency response and infrastructure. These disasters are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a global system that disproportionately burdens marginalized communities—whether it’s frontline cities in the Global South or historically disenfranchised populations in wealthy nations. Yet while Europe channels vast resources into climate innovation and technological solutions, much of the Global South struggles simply to survive the worsening storms, floods, and droughts already reshaping their lives. In short: in Europe, attention focuses on climate innovation; in the South, it’s survival. (7)
Promised climate aid from wealthy nations has been a hollow pledge. Of the $100 billion a year promised in 2015, barely $83 billion reached the countries most devastated by climate chaos in 2022, and even then, it came shackled with debt, not the outright grants these nations desperately need.(8) This isn’t simply a broken promise; it is structural violence that deepens inequality, forcing frontline communities to bear the burden twice—first from climate devastation, then from crippling debt that steals their futures. Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent of emitters produce twice the emissions of the poorest 50 percent.(9) This isn’t a crisis of carbon, it’s one of inequality.
Voices from the frontline are rising. Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate explains the crisis clearly: “You cannot adapt to lost cultures, you cannot adapt to lost traditions, you cannot adapt to lost history, you cannot adapt to starvation. You cannot adapt to extinction”.(10) Her words echo from the flood-hit villages of Bangladesh to the drought-stricken fields of Mexico, smallholder communities working desperately to survive disasters they did not create.
The path forward demands more than lofty pledges and carbon offset markets. It demands clarity of purpose, and a reckoning with history. Resilience in the Global South cannot be built on debt. Nor can trust be restored by repackaging aid as charity. What’s required are direct investments: debt cancellation, public grants for infrastructure, and the political will to phase out fossil fuel subsidies at the source.
For nations on the front lines, the climate crisis is not theoretical, it is daily life. Flooded schools, failed crops, lost homes. And yet, the solutions are often crafted an ocean away, by those who built the systems that created the crisis in the first place.
This is not about guilt. It’s about responsibility.
Until the Global North confronts its role, not just in emissions, but in shaping a global economy that leaves some to drown while others insulate, there can be no real progress. The gap between those who burn carbon and those who bury their dead will widen. And if nothing shifts, what remains may not be a future to share, but the ash of one already lost.
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