The Global South Has Lost Faith in COP28

There is no better way toremind ourselves of the urgency of climate change than by listening to the impassioned pleas of the Maldives Environment Minister, Aminath Shauna, when talking about the future of her idyllic homeland. I do not want to leave my home, I don’t want my three-year-old daughter to leave our home, she told me. On stage at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum earlier this month, she made that call again, urging “the world and international organizations, governments, to identify and to say the issue is a climate crisis.”

Hers is not an isolated story. The Maldives is just one of a number of countries that make up the Global South — a term used to describe developing nations, typically in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. They face a trifecta of problems: poverty, inequality and the effects of a warming planet. They are on the front line of this environmental crisis. Increasingly, they feel burned by richer states that have reaped the benefits of using dirty fuels to grow their economies, and are now not willing to cough up the cash for those suffering the consequences.