By Mama A. Touray
As the world continues to battle the effects of climate change, urgent action is required to curb the drivers of the climate crisis which are disproportionately affecting the poor and vulnerable communities in the Global South.
To this effect ActionAid International today will launch an international campaign titled ‘Fund our Future’, during the African Climate Summit to be held in Nairobi, Kenya.
According to its press release, the ActionAid’s new campaign Fund our Future will push financial institutions to cut funding from climate-harming industrial agriculture and all fossil fuel projects.
The release stated that the new research by ActionAid on how the finance flows revealed that the banks fueling the climate crisis revealed that in the seven years since the Paris Agreement was signed, the world’s leading financial institutions have provided US$369.2 billion in bank financing in the form of loans and underwriting to big industrial agribusiness corporations operating in the Global South.
“The report further shines a spotlight on the role of industrialized agriculture as the second largest contributor to the climate crisis after the burning of fossil fuels. The industrial agriculture approach to farming aggressively markets agrochemicals that lead to large amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, drive deforestation, and undermine billions of smallholder farmers and their agroecological farming systems which could otherwise feed the world while cooling the planet” the release stated.
“The time for serious climate action is now, the world cannot continue to pay lip service to the need for funding sustainable alternatives such as agroecology which has already proved its potency in providing food security for communities hit hardest by the effects of climate change in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” says Arthur Larok, Secretary General of ActionAid International.
The release, however, stated that in this urgent era of climate change, public funds must be scaled up and channeled in the public interest, to bring about equitable just transitions to renewable energy and agroecology. And that the madness of the world’s banks and governments continuing to finance the destruction of the planet must come to an end.