Niranjali Amerasinghe, Executive Director of ActionAid USA, said,
“The FY23 omnibus appropriations bill includes barely over $1 billion for international climate finance. At the UN climate negotiations last month, the world – including the United States – agreed that financial support to deal with climate disasters is badly needed in poorer countries. The international climate finance portion of this bill is nothing less than a shameful abdication of U.S. responsibility for addressing the climate crisis.
“International climate funding in this bill is a paltry 0.085% increase from last year. It includes no money for the Green Climate Fund, the world’s largest multilateral climate finance institution, to which the United States still owes $2 billion from a pledge that is now eight years old. Meanwhile, defense spending increased to $858 billion, an 8% increase from last year. This is unconscionable.
“This bill demonstrates very clearly what U.S. priorities are to the rest of the world. Solving the climate crisis, and ensuring that poorer countries are not left to clean up a mess that is not of their own making, is apparently not one of them.”
ENDS
Notes to editors
About ActionAid
ActionAid is a global federation that works with more than 15 million people living in more than 40 of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, just, and sustainable world in which everyone enjoys the right to a dignified life and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work for social justice and gender equality, and poverty eradication.