As a representative of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, I’ve found that it is not just coastlines that are increasingly underwater—but economies too. The Climate Vulnerable Forum’s Vulnerable Twenty Group (CVF-V20) represents 74 climate-vulnerable countries and 1.7 billion of the world’s poorest people. And as our new report shows, many of us are drowning in debt.
Our total sovereign debt stock amounted to an eye-watering $1 trillion in the latest assessment, with $746 billion in debt service payments due between this year and 2031—about four times our financing needs to support our climate plans. This is a crippling burden for countries facing escalating costs in climate damages caused by a crisis we did little to…