1. Introduction: debt and climate threats to women’s rights

As a new debt crisis is hitting the Global South, governments and economies will face growing difficulties and challenges to deal with the recovery from the pandemic and with climate emergencies. Governments all over are responding to the fiscal constraints and debt increases with spending cuts, a strategy that, far from being gender neutral, will exacerbate existing inequalities. Additionally, the climate emergency also has specific negative impacts on women’s rights and gender justice. The intersection of the debt and climate crises is increasingly getting attention from Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), academia, multilateral institutions and governments.

However, the analysis of how these twin rising emergencies are affecting women’s rights and exacerbating gender inequalities remains broadly unexplored. This chapter will address precisely how the combination of the debt and climate crises, together with the austerity strategy to face debt distress, is leading to increasing gender inequalities and threatening women’s rights, exploring how the existing international financial architecture is unfit to offer gender just solutions and presenting proposals for feminist and systemic responses.

Section 2 of the chapter addresses how governments are responding to the increasing debt crisis with spending cuts and renewed austerity policies, endangering the capacity of public services to advance human rights, including women’s rights and gender justice. Section 3 presents how the debt and climate crises are linked in a self-feeding cycle, and section 4 explores how the combination of both crises generate compounding impacts on gender inequalities and women’s rights. Section 5 exposes how the global financial architecture falls short in offering gender just and comprehensive solutions to the debt and climate crises. The relation between debt crises, natural resources exploitation and women’s rights is addressed in section 6. Finally, section 7 offers proposals on how to deal with the debt and climate crises in a comprehensive, systemic and feminist way.

2. A new debt crisis: renewed threats to women’s rights

The world has never been so indebted. Corporations, families and also governments all over the globe have seen a steep increase in their debts, particularly in the last decade, an increase that was exacerbated by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The trend is particularly worrying if we look at the public sector in Global South countries, where sovereign debt had already been increasing rapidly since the global financial crisis in 2008. The impact of the COVID-19 shock exacerbated the high debt levels, but debt vulnerabilities kept worsening after 2020 given different factors, including: the food and energy supply challenges and price spikes driven by the spillovers of the war in Ukraine but also by highly speculative markets; interest rates increases driven by monetary policies in advanced economies to tackle the global inflation; currency depreciation and increasing bond yields; and insufficient and inadequate responses from the international community to the multiple crises. Up to 54 countries in the Global South are facing severe debt problems. ‘They represent little more than 3 percent of the global economy, 18 percent of the population, but account for more than 50 percent of people living in extreme poverty – including 28 of the world’s top-50 most climate vulnerable countries’ (Jensen, 2022: 4).

The debt crisis is not only intensifying, but it is also having an undeniable impact on people’s lives. Indeed, countries with the highest debt payments are already seeing drops in public spending if we compare the situation to 2019, pre-COVID-19. The most heavily indebted nations are expected to reduce public expenditure by 3 per cent on average between 2019 and 2023 despite the need to counter the impact of spiralling food and energy prices (Woolfenden, 2022a). This tendency is at risk of being exacerbated in the upcoming years, as 94 Global South countries are expected to continue implementing austerity measures between 2023 and 2025, undermining the capacity of governments to provide access to quality public services, including education, healthcare and social protection, among others (Ortiz and Cummings, 2022: 9). This is for instance the case for climate vulnerable countries, such as Small Island Developing States (SIDS), where, while debt vulnerabilities grow, government expenditure as a percentage of GDP is predicted to decrease in 31 out of 37 SIDS between 2022 and 2025 (Fresnillo and Crotti, 2022: 9).

This fiscal consolidation trend, far from being gender neutral, exacerbates the existing gender inequalities in society and the economy, blending patriarchy and neoliberal ideology (Abed and Kelleher, 2022). In effect, the impact of budget cuts on essential public services, and other austerity measures, falls more heavily on women, girls and gender minorities, particularly those who experience intersecting inequalities based on class, ‘race’, ethnicity, caste and age (Bohoslavsky, 2019). Women, who are typically concentrated more heavily than men in lower-income sectors of society, are more affected by cuts in social protection programmes, maternity and childcare and food or energy subsidies. The gendered impact of austerity also reduces women’s ability to access essential public services, which are particularly relevant for impoverished women. It is also women, girls and gender minorities who are deeply affected by the reduction or removal of vital services for survivors of gender violence.

Moreover, it is mainly women who will carry the extra unpaid burden of the care tasks when public services coverage and quality decrease or even stop (Fresnillo, 2020). As Woodroffe and Meeks argue, ‘the availability of women’s unpaid care as a “shock absorber” is a premise on which cuts to public services are based’ (Woodroffe and Meeks, 2019). Austerity does not only rely on the gendered division of labour and the unpaid domestic work, but also on the underpaid work of women, particularly in the care economy (Ghosh, 2021). Public workers’ wage caps, typically included in austerity packages, directly impact women’s income and economic security, as the public sector tends to be a major source of employment for women (Fresnillo, 2020). For instance, a recent report by Women in Global Health estimated that up to six million women working in the health sector worldwide were either underpaid or not paid (Keeling, 2022). As evidenced, austerity policies affect women’s rights, and further entrench economic inequalities and gender justice through different channels and in different ways, but we also need to consider their cumulative impact on communities and families, which can be particularly devastating (Saalbrink, 2022).

3. The vicious circle of debt and climate emergencies

In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acknowledged the harmful self-feeding cycle between debt and climate, recognizing that not only are climate and debt problems closely linked, as climate vulnerabilities and fiscal risks are correlated, but also that ‘there is likely causation in both directions’ (Chamon et al, 2022). On the one hand, countries with unsustainable sovereign debt tend to have reduced fiscal space, not only to implement development strategies and fight gender inequalities, but also to invest in climate resilience or measures to help face the impacts of climate events.

On the other hand, in a context of increasing sovereign debts, the climate emergency is an additional key element that further exacerbates debt accumulation. The increasing impacts of the climate emergency in the Global South is leading to more external borrowing in order to be able to invest in climate measures. Countries dealing with the emergency of a climate event, including the reconstruction and recovery after the event, have little option but to borrow. As Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley described it: ‘Tackling natural disasters and protecting the environment are the single most significant causes for increases in our debt’ (DRGR, 2020). In fact, climate-extreme events are critical to sovereign debt risks, as they have had a prominent role in some default episodes, such as in Antigua and Barbuda in 2004 and 2009, in Grenada in 2004, in the Dominican Republic in 1998 or in Suriname in 1992 (Fresnillo and Crotti, 2022). Additionally, borrowing usually comes at higher costs for climate vulnerable countries in the Global South, as they have to pay higher interest rates to private creditors than other countries less vulnerable to climate change (Volz et al, 2020). Coupled with this, over 70 per cent of public climate finance delivered in 2020 was in the form of loans (OECD, 2022).

It is deeply unjust that Global South countries have to access loans from bilateral, multilateral or even private sources, in some cases at non-concessional terms, to pay for the impacts of climate change that these countries have historically contributed the least towards (Callahan and Mankin, 2022). As the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network (ASDJN) argues, ‘climate change should not impose additional debt burdens on African countries and other least developed and developing countries’ (Tamale and Majekolagbe, 2022).

4. Debt and climate crises, a double burden on women

Women, girls and gender minorities are not only more exposed to the impacts of debt crises and the implementation of fiscal consolidation and austerity measures, they also bear a heavier burden from the impacts of climate change and environmental destruction. For UN Women, the climate crisis is not ‘gender neutral’, as ‘women and girls experience the greatest impacts of climate change, which amplifies existing gender inequalities and poses unique threats to their livelihoods, health, and safety’ (UN Women, 2022). As a consequence, climate change becomes a threat multiplier for women, girls and gender minorities, impacting and exacerbating ‘new and existing forms of gendered inequities’ (OHCHR, 2022).

Women tend to be more dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, particularly in the most impoverished communities. Globally, a quarter of employed women work in agriculture, forestry and fishing (UN, 2022a), but dependency on agriculture as a source of employment is even higher in low- and lower-middle-income countries. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), ‘in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, over 60 per cent of all working women remain in agriculture, often concentrated in time and labour-intensive activities, which are unpaid or poorly remunerated’ (ILO, 2016). However, women have less access to agricultural resources, as ecosystems are increasingly commodified and priced, and less than 13 per cent of agricultural landholders are women (UN, 2022a). The need for increasing resources to repay external debt often leads to an increase in natural resource exploitation to increase export revenue, which can include land-grabbing and, therefore, less access to land for the poor, especially women (Woolfenden, 2022b).

Furthermore, climate change is already impacting ecosystems and food production systems in the agriculture, fisheries and coastal aquaculture sectors, through degraded water quality, soil erosion and lower crop yields (IPCC, 2022). Being more dependent on agriculture and having less access to secured resources means climate impacts on ecosystems and agriculture have a particular burden on women.

As noted, debt crises have the potential of worsening this situation. As debt payments increase and public resources become scarcer, governments, following IMF recommendations or conditions for accessing financial resources, are already cutting subsidies or increasing consumption taxes (Oxfam, 2022). Ortiz and Cummins’ latest research shows how in 80 countries the IMF programmes and reports between 2020 and 2022 included advice to reduce food, agricultural, fuel, electricity, gas and other subsidies. Given the disproportionate responsibility for securing food, water and fuel that women bear, such measures increase the time and effort women need to do to provide for their homes. While in the case of energy subsidies, the argument is often the need to curb the global reliance on fossil fuels, we need to consider how to minimize the impact of fossil fuel subsidy reform(s) on communities, and particularly on women. For instance, removal of fuel subsidies will likely lead to increased transport costs, thereby reducing mobility needed for work or education and health services.

In 2022, food and energy price inflation spiked, accelerated by the war in Ukraine, highly speculative commodity markets and the impacts of increasing droughts in different regions of the world, resulting in a major food crisis in many Global South countries. Already in 2021, starvation affected an estimated 828 million people globally, 59 per cent being women (Care, 2022). Hunger and malnutrition, and the gender gap in food insecurity, were already on the rise before the war in Ukraine. In a context of unabated climate change and rising debt crises, the impact of food scarcity and insecurity on women and girls will only get worse (UN, 2022b).

The cumulative impacts of climate change, a debt crisis, austerity measures and food insecurity forces women to adjust, often without public support (or diminishing public support due to spending cuts) and to search for additional financial support. This results in an increased reliance on ‘extractive consumer loans’, generating or increasing personal debts particularly for households headed by women (Muchhala and Guillem, 2022). The combination of cuts in public services, increased cost of living (exacerbated by climate change impacts) and differentiated consumption patterns leads to an increase in women’s indebtedness in order to be able to access basic rights such as health, education and housing. In addition, the increase of precarity and flexibilization of labour rules, often following IMF advice for reforms leading to fiscal consolidation, also leads to indebtedness by women in order to engage in informal work ventures (Serafini and Fois, 2021).

We also need to consider that the impact of climate extreme events and environmental hazards increase the burden of unpaid domestic work for women as they need to invest more hours in securing water, food and energy for cooking and heating the homes (UN Women, 2022). Women and girls are, for instance, responsible for collecting water in almost two thirds of households in developing countries. When a climate hazard occurs, such as a hurricane or flood, routes become impassable and basic services, including water provision, can simply become inaccessible, or women, especially those in rural areas, will have to walk longer distances to access resources. When these impacts occur amidst a debt crisis, the lack of access is exacerbated due to closed or underfunded public services such as health centres, schools and water provision facilities due to austerity packages. According to UN Women, ‘this puts added pressure on girls, who often have to leave school to help their mothers manage the increased burden’ (UN Women, 2022). Additionally, when struggling with unsustainable debts, governments might find it impossible or will take much longer to reconstruct damaged routes and infrastructure unless they obtain external financial support. Support that, if available, will usually come in the form of new loans that will add to existing debts.

The case of Puerto Rico illustrates this situation. Four months after declaring bankruptcy following a profound debt crisis, Hurricane Maria hit the country in 2017 causing major devastation and losses of US$68 billion, or around 69 per cent of the territory’s GDP. An estimated 2,975 people perished from hurricane-related causes. Water and sanitation facilities were also heavily damaged, increasing the burden on women to obtain water (Oxfam, 2018). In some rural areas, water and energy came back only after several months because of the government’s limited capacity to finance reconstruction due to its debt crisis and austerity policies put in place.

Damage to infrastructure caused by climate change can also mean that women are at higher risk of living in unsafe and overcrowded shelters, given their lack of owned land or property. In this context, ‘women and girls face increased vulnerabilities to all forms of gender-based violence, including conflict-related sexual violence, human trafficking, child marriage, and other forms of violence’ (UN Women, 2022). Evidence also suggests that climate displacement disproportionately affects women and girls in the Global South (Care, 2020). Not only are girls more likely to be taken out of school to support household duties, if the situation deteriorates, some families might ‘feel they have no choice but to give their daughters away for early marriage, often resulting in early pregnancy’ (Action Aid, 2022). In fact, about 12 million more young girls are thought to have been married off after environmental hazards and weather-related catastrophes have been shown to increase sex trafficking by 20 to 30 per cent (Harvey, 2020). Environmental degradation and natural resources scarcity linked to climate breakdown amplify gender inequalities and violence against women and girls (Castañeda Camey et al, 2020). Gender-based violence is increasingly being inflicted on female climate refugees who face extortion, exploitation, rape, sexual harassment, survival sex, forced marriage and human trafficking in transit and/or in destination countries (Harvey, 2020). In the context of over-indebted countries, the lack of fiscal resources makes governments less capable of providing adequate support and shelter for women after a climate event, to secure services for gender violence survivors, or to put policies in place to protect girls from early marriages and trafficking, among other policies to reduce gender violence (Bohoslavsky, 2019).

Finally, climate change and its impacts, and environmental degradation, also have differential gender health effects. These can exacerbate women’s and girls’ undernutrition and exposure to diseases such as malaria or anaemia, and negatively impact in accessing health care services, aggravating existing gender gaps and damaging sexual and reproductive health and rights (UN, 2022a). This adds to the impacts of debt distress on public health systems and, consequently, on women’s health and reproductive rights. According to UNICEF, ‘even before the current crisis, one fifth of LMICs spent more on debt service than on education, health and social protection combined’, and increasing debt burdens threaten ‘to crowd out social spending still further’ (UNICEF, 2021). All while at least half of the world’s population still do not have access to essential health services and only half of women in developing countries receive the recommended amount of maternal and reproductive health care (UN, 2020).

In conclusion, climate change, as well as debt crises, act as multipliers of existing intersectional gender-based inequalities. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, ‘climate change impacts can be gendered as a result of customary roles in society, such as triple workloads for women (that is, economic labour, household and family labour, and duties of community participation)’ (IPCC, 2022). By carrying out climate adaptation measures and diverting their time away from other priorities, women increase their non-paid domestic and care workload. This increased burden also acts as a barrier to them engaging in community participation and political decision making on measures that directly affect them. Various United Nations (UN) agencies have highlighted that women and men can have different solutions to addressing the same climate impact and these responses can impose higher costs and negative consequences for specific groups, shifting exposure and vulnerability (IPCC, 2022). However, when engaging women in defining solutions, it results in better outcomes for all parts of a community (Achampong, 2022b). Which is why it is crucial that women are involved in decision making, project development and policy implementation processes. Yet, multiple barriers exist for women, including female exclusion norms in society on including women within decision and policy making. This forced removal of their political agency means women’s knowledge and experiences are missing from decision making, which is exacerbated in the context of increasing climate impacts.

5. Debt and climate finance architecture: unfit for purpose

The debt architecture and climate finance architecture are not fit for purpose to address the compounded impacts of the twin debt and climate crises on women. The continued absence of a multilateral debt resolution framework that ensures a systematic, rules-based and timely approach to orderly, fair, transparent and durable sovereign debt crisis resolution is a persisting gap in the international financial architecture (Perera, 2019). Against this backdrop, in 2020 the G20 approved two initiatives to address the debt problems arising from the COVID-19 shock. The Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), providing temporary debt payment moratoria to a limited number of countries, and the Common Framework (CF), aspiring to deliver on timely and comprehensive debt treatment for countries with unsustainable debt levels. However, they have proved to be insufficient and inadequate, particularly for climate vulnerable countries and from a development and people’s rights approach. Both initiatives are limited to a list of 73 countries, leaving out quite a number of middle-income countries, both in critical debt situations and very vulnerable to climate impacts. Furthermore, the participation of private creditors in both initiatives is voluntary, and the DSSI experience casts doubts on the capacity of the IMF or the G20 to enforce private sector participation in any debt restructuring or cancellation. Within today’s debt architecture, the only way to ensure participation of private creditors in debt resolution is to stop paying them. However, countries that default on their debt payments risk legal action from private creditors, particularly for debt issued under New York or London law. Thus it is crucial to ensure there is adequate finance and legislation to protect defaulting countries against uncollaborative creditors.

The uncertainties and lack of clarity regarding the implementation of the CF remains high. Furthermore, participation in the CF is conditional on having an IMF programme. As outlined earlier, such programmes can become a Trojan horse to impose further gendered austerity measures, threatening women’s rights and increasing gender inequalities. This is also because debt restructurings are based on the IMF and World Bank debt sustainability analysis, which determines how much debt is sustainable for a country. However, the preeminent approach to debt sustainability is fairly limited to that of capacity of payment, regardless of the resources available to invest in social protection, public services, gender equality or climate resilience. A new approach to debt sustainability should consider the impact of a country’s debt burden on its ability to meet its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to fight climate change and to create the conditions for the realization of all universal human rights, including women’s rights, overcoming the gender blindness of the existing debt sustainability analysis. In conclusion, the current international financial architecture does not offer an optimal framework or guarantees for a fair, lasting, comprehensive and timely resolution to the debt challenges. Nor does it offer an appropriate approach to debt restructurings considering the climate and gender equality challenges.

In parallel, the current climate finance architecture also comes with important challenges to deliver fair and gender just responses. It is a complex and diverse system of different state and non-state stakeholders very much affected by global economic conditions, such as high inflation, price changes and economic shocks caused by global upheavals. This architecture draws on the development finance model to source solutions, to fill the quantity and quality gap on climate finance. Unfortunately, this has led to the proliferation of lending in development finance to be replicated in climate finance, as 70 per cent of public climate finance in 2020 was delivered in the form of loans (OECD, 2022). Furthermore, public climate finance flows amounted in 2020 to US$68.3 billion, falling short of the existing global, annual US$100 billion climate finance goal, which the OECD predicted would not be met until 2023 (OECD, 2022). Moreover, EURODAD calculations based on OECD data show that the inability to meet the yearly US$100 billion goal has left developing countries at a deficit of US$381.6 billion in bilateral public climate finance and multilateral public climate finance attributable to developed countries between 2013 and 2020 (Achampong, 2022a).

In this bleak context of insufficient responses and inadequate debt and climate finance architecture, numerous voices have been pointing at climate for debt swaps as a possible innovative solution. Debt-for-climate swaps (where liberated funds are invested in climate adaptation and mitigation measures) or debt-for-nature swaps (where funds are invested in conservation goals) are seen by some as ‘win-win’ solutions that could both relieve some of a country’s debt burden and free up resources at a national level to address the climate crisis. However, historical experience tells us that debt swaps have not been efficient when it comes to reducing debt significantly, particularly in cases of unsustainable debt levels. While well-designed debt swaps can free up resources for climate resilience investments, there are risks and challenges that should be taken into consideration. For instance, debtor governments can face challenges in mobilizing counterpart resources, particularly if they were unable to repay the original debt in the first place. Traditionally, debt swaps also have high transaction costs and negotiating debt swaps tends to be a lengthy process. When promoting debt swaps, country ownership should always be protected, avoiding any kind of conditionality or tied aid imposed by the donor. People’s rights, including indigenous and other communities’ ancestral rights over land use or use of resources, should be guaranteed. For instance, as Andre Standing has argued, ‘debt swaps can come with a wider set of obligations, including the privatization of fishing rights, advancing blue carbon trading, expanding high end eco-tourism and commercial fish farming. These are policies that small-scale fishing communities have often opposed’ (Standing, 2022). To avoid such risks, civil society participation should be a key element in debt swaps, including by women’s and gender minority groups, but in many cases this hasn’t been the case. Finally, climate-for-debt swaps should be additional to aid and climate finance commitments. In summary, while progress on debt swaps could help to free up resources for investment needs if well defined, with civil society and women’s participation and substantially scaled up, it should not be seen as a solution for unsustainable debts nor as a substitute for climate finance commitments.

The need for adequate and accessible climate finance and finance to address loss and damage that does not exacerbate existing debt problems is vital for countries in the Global South. This was further echoed at COP27, where countries expressed ‘deep concern regarding the significant financial costs associated with loss and damage for developing countries, resulting in a growing debt burden and impairing the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals’ (UNFCCC, 2022b). Also, the possibility of automatic debt payments’ standstills in the aftermath of a climate extreme event would ease the hardship of highly indebted countries when being hit by climate change. Barbados, for instance, is already including climate clauses to its debt issuance to enable a debt service suspension (Cleary Gottlieb, 2020). Lenders such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the government of the United Kingdom are also exploring this option (Wailhe, 2019; UK Export Finance, 2022).

Moreover, despite the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recommending that climate finance providers ‘improve tracking and reporting on gender-related aspects of climate finance, impact measuring and mainstreaming’, data gaps remain (UNFCCC, 2018). Climate finance reporting tables used under the Paris Agreement do not include space for gender to be tracked, but countries may on a voluntary basis include such data under ‘additional information’ (UNFCCC, 2022a). As we have seen, climate change affects members of communities in different ways, so understanding the gender responsiveness of climate finance is essential to knowing if the differing needs and rights of women, girls and non-gendered communities are adequately being accounted for and addressed in climate action (Achampong, 2022a).

6. Exploiting natural resources to repay debts

With high levels of debt, and in a context of increasing energy and commodity prices, countries in the Global South have been exploiting their natural resources – including fossil fuels, mining or forests – in order to increase exports and use the revenue in foreign currency to repay increasing debts. We have recently seen, for instance, how countries like Suriname are being pushed by its private creditors to pursue future oil extraction in order to be able to repay its debts (Maki, 2022). Several Pacific Island states are already expanding their mining activities in the face of increasing debts. And in the case of Chad, the country has been denied debt relief on the account of increasing oil prices, and therefore the assumption that oil exploitation needs to be continued or even increased. Some countries can even find themselves in a debt-fossil fuel production trap. According to Debt Justice, ‘countries rely on fossil fuel revenues to repay debt, anticipated revenues from fossil fuels are often overinflated and require huge investments to reach expected returns, leading to further debt alongside the environmental and human harms caused by such projects’ (Woolfenden, 2022b).

When countries turn to increased exploitation of natural resources, women tend to be more impacted; given, for example, the predominant role they play in firewood collection and engagement in forestry value chains as a supplement to their household income (FAO, 2014). In the end, intensifying the exploitation of natural resources to repay public debts will eventually increase climate vulnerabilities, by generating desertification, soil degradation and an increase in carbon emissions. It also exacerbates the countries’ dependency on commodities, together with the additional debt vulnerabilities that this may bring, as the infrastructures needed are usually debt financed. In many of these cases, the exploitation of natural resources is encouraged by international financial institutions, donors and creditors. According to a report by ActionAid USA and the Bretton Woods Project, in over half of IMF’s 105 member countries, IMF policy advice had endorsed, or directly supported, the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure between when the Paris Agreement was signed in December 2015 and March 2021, despite the urgent need to reduce emissions (Sward et al, 2021). A striking example of this is the IMF push for Argentina to exploit its oil and gas reserves in Vaca Muerta in order to reduce its reliance on expensive energy imports and increase their fiscal capacity to be able to repay its debts. ‘Such incentives for fossil fuel expansion contradict the IMF’s advertised climate orientation that centres on aiding countries phasing out of fossil fuel usage’ (Stubbs and Kentikelenis, 2022).

Overconsumption of fossil fuels, particularly in the Global North, spurs this dynamic. The hegemony of the Global North distorts the domestic economic priorities of Global South countries, and the extraction of resources to fuel industrialization in the Global North has been a recurring tool to maintain hegemony. Studies on spatial inequality and economic justice show that the economic prowess of richer economies influences other countries’ macroeconomic policies (McKay and Perge, 2015). Specifically, in some cases the higher consumption rates of richer countries affects what poorer countries choose to produce and export (Felipe et al, 2014), which in turn contributes to creating the poor environmental and social conditions under which production is carried out.

There is a clear colonial mindset of decarbonizing Global North countries by shifting its fossil fuel infrastructure to developing countries and extracting the resources necessary for building renewable energy infrastructure from the Global South. All in order to maintain the status quo of energy and overall consumption levels in the North, enabling intergenerational wealth accumulation in the Global North and intergenerational inequity in the Global South. Such strategies are actively promoted by multilateral development banks such as the World Bank (World Bank, 2020). This externalization of impacts, often argued for by the need to increase revenue to repay existing debts, not only distorts global power dynamics, but it also increases the risk of severe climate impacts in the Global South, which as we have seen are strongly gendered.

7. How to address the debt and climate crises in a comprehensive, systemic and feminist way

The world today faces several game-changing challenges, among which the climate emergency and the rise of new debt crises stand out. As we have seen in previous sections, the intersection of climate change and debt emergencies has resulted in pervasive inequalities, particularly exacerbating gender inequalities. As evidenced, the twin debt and climate crises have a cumulative impact on communities and families, which can be particularly devastating for women that experience intersecting inequalities based on class, ‘race’, ethnicity, caste and age. The use of austerity measures and fiscal consolidation to contain debt is affecting the range and quality of public services, increasing unpaid work, and exposing women and gender minorities to more physical climate change and financial vulnerabilities than their male counterparts. These dynamics are made worse by an unfit debt and climate finance architecture that is ill-equipped to provide fair and lasting solutions to the current twin debt and climate crises. The interplay of these phenomena is putting at risk the fulfilment and advancement of women’s human rights and towards gender justice in the world, particularly in the Global South, and impacting the Global South journey to sustainable development.

The international community has so far failed to provide adequate support for Global South countries to be able to deal with the dual and compounded impacts of the climate and debt crises. The unwillingness of Global North countries to reform the existing international financial architecture and to fulfil their climate finance and development assistance commitments are at the core of this failure. By endorsing the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) on the climate crisis, but not fulfilling the climate finance commitments, countries in the Global North are showing that there is no real acknowledgement of the responsibility they have for climate change. They fail to acknowledge the climate debt that the Global North has with the Global South due to their disproportionate contribution to carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions (Callahan and Mankin, 2022).

However, the core of the problem is the persisting neocolonial and patriarchal economic dynamics and the fossil fuels and growth obsessions of the capitalist system. Maintaining the current dependency and exploitation of fossil fuels, far from resulting in sustainable development, is a recipe for long-term economic catastrophe, social and environmental disaster, and the exacerbation of existing poverty and inequalities. A fundamental shift in the global economy towards a new model that puts care and people’s rights at the centre, respecting the material and natural limits of the planet and atmosphere, is imperative to avoid further climate change. Furthermore, sustainable development is under threat from the disastrous implications of the climate emergency, dwindling natural resources, changing ecosystems and environmental hazards.

A fair response to the multiple crises in the Global South should also address the recognition of climate and other ecological, social and historical debts that countries in the Global North have with them. A debt that started with slavery and colonialism, but that continued with neocolonial resource pillage and unfair trade, financial and political relations that have lasted for centuries. In this historical context, responses to the climate and debt crises should start with the recognition and reparations for climate and ecological debt.

Global North countries, which have historically contributed the most to climate change, need to live up to their commitments in relation to climate action, which are not completed unless they also contribute with financial support to help address the climate impacts they have caused in Global South countries. Doing so is a reparation for causing irrevocable climate change. In this sense, climate finance represents a redistribution of resources between countries to address historical unequal responsibilities for current ongoing climate change (Achampong, 2022a). Climate finance commitments and debt cancellation should be part of a wider set of structural and financial reparations that should also include ecological restoration, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, ending extractivism and shifting to decarbonized modes of production, distribution and consumption.

Beyond the profound change that we need to see in the world and economic system in order to redress the climate emergency and the unsustainable debt accumulation, there is an urgent need to reform the international financial architecture and climate finance architecture. Such reforms should address the need for a fair, transparent and multilateral framework for debt crisis resolution that includes unsustainable and illegitimate debt, under the auspices of the UN and not in lender-dominated arenas. This should include the delivery of unconditional debt cancellation for climate vulnerable countries and other nations in need and a new approach to debt sustainability, but also of equitable, high quality and new and additional climate finance that contributes to sustainable development in developing countries in the Global South. The entire climate finance architecture needs to be reframed to focus not on investments and cost, but on ownership, debt sustainability, economically-just climate finance flows, transparency and accountability. Finance to address loss and damage, and an automatic mechanism to halt debt payments in the wake of climate extreme events, must also be enacted. Unconditional debt cancellation and effective climate finance flows can be an opportunity to move away from development models that have prioritized growth, industrialization, trade and the interests of development finance providers. Particularly if social structures that facilitate equal access to finance, decision making and policy development and implementation are available.