Climate debt makes low-emitting countries pay twice—first in climate devastation, then in debt—for a crisis they did not cause.

In 2022, Pakistan drowned. A third of the country slipped beneath floodwater. Thirty-three million people were forced from their homes, and damages surpassed $30 billion. Pakistan, for its trouble, contributes less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions. Yet when the waters receded, the bill that arrived was not only for reconstruction; it was for interest. The country rebuilt by borrowing abroad, as if survival were a luxury financed on credit.

Three years later, in 2025, the floods returned with even greater devastation. Nearly 20 million acres of farmland were destroyed, wheat crops failed, and losses climbed past $45 billion. Again, Pakistan found itself at the IMF negotiating table, accepting conditions that compounded the emergency, including demands to deregulate wheat prices. The impact was immediate: farmers were squeezed between rising input costs and collapsing returns. As Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari put it plainly, deregulating agriculture amid a climate emergency is “a foolish idea and plan.”

This is the reality of climate debt: countries pay once in catastrophe, and then pay again in compound interest.

Climate debt is not a slogan and not a metaphor. It is a balance sheet. Today, much of what is counted as public climate finance arrives not as grants but as loans. Every cyclone, drought, or flood becomes more than a humanitarian disaster; it becomes a fiscal trap that locks governments into decades of repayment for damage they did not cause.

The pattern repeats across the Global South with a grim predictability.

Kenya, facing its worst drought in decades, has turned to international lenders even as millions confront hunger. Mozambique, shattered by Cyclone Idai, watched its debt burden swell while communities remained in ruins. Bangladesh now spends more servicing its debt than it does adapting to the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, fossil-fuel companies have posted some of their highest earnings in recent years, and the countries least responsible for carbon pollution find themselves drowning not only in floods but in liabilities. The catastrophe is visible from space; the financing shows up later, in spreadsheets and repayment schedules.

The injustice becomes even sharper when you look at emissions per person. An average American emits fourteen times more carbon than a Pakistani. What a Kenyan emits in three years, an Australian emits in four months. Per-capita comparisons are imperfect, but they clarify the moral geometry of the crisis: the people paying the steepest price are not the people who ran the meter.

A simple analogy makes the point unavoidable. Imagine four roommates sharing one electricity bill. Two run multiple air conditioners around the clock. The other two use a single fan and a lightbulb. When the bill arrives, the high consumers insist everyone split it equally, and then suggest the low consumers take out loans to cover their share. Would anyone call that fair?

Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Kenya are among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, and also among the lowest emitters. Australia, the United States, and Russia are high emitters and far less vulnerable.

This disconnect lies at the heart of climate debt: those who contributed least to the crisis are asked to borrow the most, to endure it.

The “double payment” is not only financial; it is existential. First, communities pay in displacement, disease, and death. In Pakistan’s Sindh province, families uprooted by the floods still live in makeshift shelters years later.

Second, they pay through debt servicing that drains national budgets. Pakistan now spends more on interest payments than it does on health and education combined.

The cycle is vicious. Disasters destroy productive capacity. Countries borrow to rebuild. Debt service blocks investment in resilience. The next disaster hits harder, not because a society failed to plan, but because it was forced to plan around repayment.

This is not mismanagement; it is structural injustice embedded in the architecture of international finance.

A fair global climate-finance system must rest on three principles. Climate finance should be grants, not loans. Existing climate-related debt should be cancelled or restructured. And the loss and damage mechanism should be fully funded, not treated as a rhetorical afterthought.

There is money in the system when political will demands it. Global military spending surpassed $2.4 trillion last year. Security is not defined only by weapons; the collapse of climate resilience is now among the world’s sharpest security threats.

Debt relief should be exchanged for commitments to invest in renewable energy, resilient agriculture, and green infrastructure, not in interest payments. Loss and damage should be financed through levies on fossil-fuel profits and contributions proportional to historical emissions. Anything less would be a moral failure.

Climate debt embeds injustice into the structure of international finance. It tells vulnerable communities that their survival is a loan, not a right. That bargain erodes trust and increases instability. The greatest threat to international security is not only nuclear escalation; it is the systemic impoverishment of billions through climate breakdown and debt imperialism.

The Global South should not pay twice for a crisis it did not create. The first payment (in lives, livelihoods, and ruined landscapes) is already unbearable. The second payment (in debt, austerity, and perpetual vulnerability) is morally indefensible.

If climate justice means anything, it must begin with debt justice: grants instead of loans. Reparations instead of charity. Systemic transformation instead of incremental reform. Climate justice is not generosity; it is the repayment of a long-ignored debt.