Briefs

Survival of the Richest

How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality

Carbon Billionaires: The investment emissions of the world's richest people

The world’s richest people emit huge and unsustainable amounts of carbon and, unlike ordinary people, 50% to 70% of their emissions result from their investments. New analysis of the investments of 125 of the world’s richest billionaires shows that on average they are emitting 3 million tonnes a year, more than a million times the average for someone in the bottom 90% of humanity.

The study also finds billionaire investments in polluting industries such as fossil fuels and cement are double the average for the S&P 500 group of companies. Billionaires hold extensive stakes in many of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations, which gives them the power to influence the way these companies act. Governments must hold them to account, legislating to compel corporates and investors to reduce carbon emissions, enforcing more stringent reporting requirements and imposing new taxation on wealth and investments in polluting industries.

Climate Finance Short-changed: The real value of the $100 billion commitment in 2019–2020

In 2009, high-income countries promised to provide $100bn a year in climate finance to low- and middle-income countries by 2020. They have failed to keep this promise. Their official reports claim that the climate finance they provided and mobilized reached $83.3bn in 2020, but Oxfam estimates the real value was only around a third of that reported.

Immediate action is needed to restore trust in the $100bn goal and ensure that the provision of climate finance is fair and robust. For too long, most high-income countries have persisted in counting the wrong things in the wrong way. There are too many loans, too much debt, too few grants, too little for adaptation, and too much dishonest and misleading accounting.

This paper sets out recommendations for action at COP27 and beyond to rectify these issues, restore trust in climate finance and stop the world’s poorest climate-vulnerable countries and communities being short-changed of the climate finance they urgently need, and to which they are entitled.

The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2022

The 2022 Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index is the first detailed analysis published looking at governments’ policies and actions to fight inequality during the first two years of the pandemic. It reviews the spending, tax and labour policies and actions of 161 governments during 2020–2022. COVID-19 has increased inequality worldwide, as the poorest were hit hardest by both the disease and its profound economic impacts. Yet the CRI 2022 Index shows clearly that most of the world’s governments failed to mitigate this dangerous rise in inequality. Despite the biggest global health emergency in a century, half of low-and lower-middle-income countries saw the share of health spending fall during the pandemic, half of the countries tracked by the CRI Index cut the share of social protection spending, 70% cut the share of education spending, while two-thirds of countries failed to increase their minimum wage in line with gross domestic product (GDP). Ninety five percent of countries failed to increase taxation of the richest people and corporations. At the same time, a small group of governments from across the world bucked this trend, taking clear actions to combat inequality, putting the rest of the world to shame.

Hunger in a heating world

One third of Pakistan has been flooded. Crops and topsoil washed away; farming infrastructure destroyed. On the other side of the Arabian Sea, Somalia is experiencing its worst drought for 40 years with crops failing and livestock dying. Our climate isn’t just changing, it has changed. Climate change is fueling hunger for millions of people around the world. Extreme weather events have increased five-fold over the past 50 years, destroying homes, decimating livelihoods, fueling conflict and displacement, and deepening inequality.

Fixing Our Food

Debunking 10 myths about the global food system and what drives hunger