Lower income countries spend five times more on debt payments than dealing with climate change

Jubilee Debt Campaign has conducted research which finds that in 2021 lower income countries are spending over five times more on external debt payments than projects to protect people from the impacts of climate change. The figure compares external debt payments in 2021 with an estimate of how much countries are spending on adapting to climate change. There is no one dataset for how much governments are spending on climate change adaptation. Therefore, we investigated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) submitted to the UNFCCC by individual countries. These NDCs set out what a country plans to invest in climate change adaptation. These plans are a mixture of what a country would like to invest if it received international funding to do so, and what it will invest from its own domestic resources.