As the New York Climate Week continued, and following the UN Secretary General’s Climate Ambition Summit on Wednesday, September 20th, in New York, Teresa Anderson, Global Lead on Climate Justice, ActionAid International, said:
“With the Secretary-General setting a higher bar for attendance, the absence of the biggest emitting countries was glaring, and there was plenty of not-so-subtle finger pointing at foot-draggers, shady pledges, and broken promises. Shutting down the space for greenwashing is a necessary start. But we have yet to see the real action and finance needed to dramatically bring down emissions and protect people from climate disasters.
The fossil fuel industry rightly got a hammering. Big industrial agriculture, as the second largest contributor to global emissions, continues to fly under the climate radar, however. It’s time for industrial agriculture corporations to take their place in the climate spotlight next to fossil fuels, where they belong.”
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Notes to editors
ActionAid’s recent report “How the Finance Flows: The Banks Fueling the Climate Crisis” found that in the seven years since the Paris Agreement was signed, the world’s banks have provided US$ 370 billion to industrial agriculture corporations operating in the Global South, and US$ 3.2 trillion to fossil fuel corporations operating in the Global South. When taken as an annual average and compared to the real value of climate finance in 2020, more than 20 times more financing is going to the causes of climate in the Global South than to the solutions.
About ActionAid
ActionAid is a global federation working with more than 15 million people living in more than 40 of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, fair, and sustainable world in which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty.
