Climate adaptation: rich countries leave the South to foot the bill

According to Al Jazeera, a UN report warns that funding for climate adaptation remains far below the needs of developing countries. The Qatari broadcaster has made it the subject of a programme, "Inside Story", which asks why rich countries are failing to honour their commitments. That is what we know. The rest, precise figures, countries concerned and timetable, does not appear in the note we have, and we will not invent it.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the word "failure" is a little polite. It suggests an oversight, a lapse of care, a file misplaced. But a shortfall in adaptation finance is not an accident: it is a budgetary choice. The countries that contributed most to warming, through two centuries of burning fossil fuels, are those with the means to act, and they devote those means to other priorities. Those who contributed least find themselves building dykes, switching seed varieties and rehousing families with whatever they have, which is often very little.

This is where dependency theory serves as a magnifying glass, without the jargon. Southern economies have not simply "fallen behind": they were shaped to supply raw materials, cheap labour and markets to the centre. Debt service and conditional loans lock that position in place. Apply this to climate: a state that devotes a large share of its revenue to repaying creditors has all the less room to protect its coastline or its harvests. And when aid arrives as loans rather than grants, adaptation becomes one more debt. We are financing the catastrophe on credit, from those who caused it.

Amilcar Cabral reminded us that colonised peoples have their own history, interrupted by "the violent action of an external factor" (our translation, L'Arme de la théorie). That sentence fits the present crisis uncannily well: climate breakdown is one more external factor, imposed on societies that did not decide it. For him, national liberation means freeing the development of productive forces from all foreign domination. Hard to claim that when you depend on conditional charity from donors to survive the floods.

In fairness, we should also not blame everything on outsiders: the concepts of the anti-colonial tradition remind us that local elites can run the inherited apparatus without changing its structure. The question to put to Southern governments is therefore twofold: who receives the funds, and who benefits from them?

What we still do not know: the exact size of the gap, the share of loans versus grants, the names of the defaulting payers. What we know of the structure is nonetheless enough to feed distrust. When promises are counted in billions and needs in lives, the gap is not a miscalculation. It is a policy.