Who Pays to Adapt? Climate Debt and Populist Politics of Climate Justice in Africa
Children sit on the bed of a drying lake beneath an orange, pollution-filled sky, illustrating climate change and global warming. Photo: Dreamstime.
In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja uses the concept of “climate debt populism” to examine how climate vulnerability, sovereign debt, and distributive injustice are becoming politically intertwined across Africa. He argues that adaptation finance is not only a technical question of resource mobilization, but also a struggle over responsibility, legitimacy, and who ultimately bears the costs of climate survival. Drawing on examples from Senegal, Zambia, and Malawi, Dr. Solaja shows how climate shocks can intensify fiscal vulnerability, while debt servicing can restrict governments’ capacity to invest in resilience. He calls for a more just climate-finance architecture centered on grant-based adaptation, debt restructuring, accountability, participation, and recognition of Africa’s historically unequal contribution to global emissions
Africa’s climate politics is entering a more consequential phase. The debate is no longer about whether vulnerable societies need adaptation finance, but how their political and financial relationship is shaped when they receive it through debt. The resources governments already have to service debt can create a paradox when small increases in debt are added to shield citizens from climate risks: the funds required to lessen vulnerability can create more vulnerability.
This commentary proposes the concept of ‘climate debt populism’ to reflect the political reasoning that can be forged from this paradox. I do not imply, in using the term, that there is an existing pan-African political movement, but rather use it as an analytical framework to examine the potential for linking climate vulnerability, fiscal pressure, and distributive injustice with the populist statement: communities that were least responsible for past greenhouse gas emissions should not bear the burden of additional fiscal costs just to be secure. This struggle is not fundamentally about people who want to act on climate change versus people who don’t. It is a conflict over who has the authority, responsibility, and resources to determine who pays for climate survival.
Why should those who contributed least to the climate crisis pay to survive it?
The Question Behind Climate Finance
Vulnerability is the language of climate change in Africa. With warming, droughts, flooding and food insecurity, adaptation is a pressing developmental need, with increasing water stress and disruption to livelihoods. But vulnerability is not the sole determinant of the politics of adaptation. The question of who pays for protection is becoming increasingly distributive: on whose conditions and at what cost to public finances and future generations?
The answer matters because Africa is in a unique position within the global climate economy. The continent has been responsible for a relatively small share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but faces the highest climate risks. According to the African Development Bank, Africa accounts for less than 4 percent of global emissions but receives only about 3 percent of global climate finance (AfDB, 2025). At the same time, many African countries struggle with limited fiscal space and high debt-service burdens. The outcome is a political economy where the need for adaptation meets the financial limits of the states that will be expected to provide it.
The problem is more than money. It’s about the conditions and modalities of climate finance. Grant financing can increase adaptive capacity without adding a new debt burden. Loans can offer short-term flexibility, but they can also shift the burden of financing adaptation to climate change into the future. The difference between resilience and recovery financing is a political question in situations of repeated climate shocks and additional borrowing.
Climate finance is thus not apolitical. It shares responsibilities among countries, generations and social groups. When people feel they are losing out because of climate change, and that public funding is being limited or restricted, finance becomes an issue of fairness and political legitimacy.
Changing the Conversation from Climate Populism to Climate Debt Populism
Climate debt populism is analytically different from the current discourse on climate populism and extends ideas in this conversation. Political representations of climate policy typically frame the issue as a clash between a righteous or derelict population and those who represent and are responsible for the environment and environmental transition policies, such as the state, the market, or the public interest. When the policy is contentious, as it becomes when measures like carbon pricing or subsidy reform and energy transition are felt to be economically burdensome, climate politics can get messy in these accounts.
Climate debt populism changes what is contended. Its main grievance might not be climate action. Instead, it’s about the inequity of funding climate action and climate harm. The conflict arises when the price of adaptation is seen as an indicator of an international order that is separate from responsibility and burden.
The populist logic may thus be expressed in three interconnected steps. First, a material injury is apparent: crops fail to produce, houses are destroyed by floodwater, electricity networks are weakened, livelihoods are lost, and public services are economically constrained. Second, the injury is read by making a moral judgment between those suffering and those seen to have disproportionate power to control the distribution of costs. Third, this distinction becomes a political demand for recognition, redistribution and accountability.
‘The elite’ concerned is therefore far less monolithic than in traditional national populist politics. It could involve national political and economic decision makers, foreign creditors, financial institutions, rich high-emitting countries and technocratic institutions thought to set the rules for accessing funding by vulnerable societies. This doesn’t mean these actors form a unified bloc. Instead, they can be symbolically linked in a popular story of unequal responsibility.
This matters because it avoids making the concept synonymous with anti-Westernism or with opposition to the international financial system. Climate debt populism is not a movement against debt, but a struggle about the legitimacy of an unequal burden of climate responsibility. Its basic moral principle is that adaptation costs should be assigned by considering historical responsibility, current exposure, and financial resources.
Debt Amplifies Climate Change as a Political Vulnerability
Young African woman carrying water in a village near Bamako, Mali, symbolizing the human impact of drought and water scarcity. Photo: Dreamstime.
This political claim has material force through debt. According to ActionAid International’s analysis of 65 highly climate-vulnerable countries, in September 2026, these countries will have paid almost 25 times more on debt repayments than on climate action. It notes that debt servicing as a share of government revenue is estimated to consume about 65 percent in Global South countries and is about 225 times higher than the climate finance they receive via grants (ActionAid International, 2026). The statistics must be viewed with care as they are an amalgamation and do not represent a consistent African experience. Their importance, however, lies in the structural relationship they point to: obligations to repay fiscal resources can take up fiscal resources just when investment in adaptation has to increase.
The resulting mechanism is potentially self-reinforcing. High-severity climate events cause economic and physical damage. The funding of emergency relief, reconstruction and social protection in the face of the government must be made. If grants and concessional resources are insufficient, additional borrowing becomes attractive or unavoidable. This leaves less fiscal room for preventive investments because of debt-service obligations. Weak adaptation leaves communities exposed to subsequent shocks, which generate additional losses and renewed financing needs. Fiscal vulnerability can thus exacerbate climate risk, and climate risk can constrain capacity to reduce fiscal vulnerability.
This is not to say that climate change is solely responsible for debt crises in Africa. Sovereign debt is determined by domestic fiscal policies, commodity dependence, exchange-rate pressures, borrowing policies, governance, global interest rates and the structure of the international financial system. A credible argument in the name of climate justice must, therefore, withstand monocausal explanations. The more assertive position is that climate shocks exacerbate existing financial fragilities and can make an already challenging debt situation much tougher.
Senegal: When Debt Service Crowds Out Climate Ambition
Senegal is a case in point for the inseparability of politics and fiscal capacity in climate finance. According to ActionAid’s 2026 analysis, Senegal’s debt servicing is more than 96 percent of government revenue and over 600 times its planned spending on climate action. For every US$1 budgeted for climate action, US$605 is being spent on debt servicing, according to the calculation. The exact proportion should be regarded as a representation of the fiscal structure of a particular advocacy organization, and not as a yardstick for the country’s fiscal structure. Its political significance nevertheless remains striking.
Fiscal constraint is not a macroeconomic phenomenon, but a condition that affects citizens engaged in agriculture and reliant on infrastructure and functioning public services. It is felt when there is a risk, and the state is unable to protect people. A farmer confronting declining productivity does not experience sovereign debt as a balance-sheet category. The experience is mediated through access to irrigation, agricultural support, roads, electricity, social protection and the state’s capacity to respond when climate shocks occur.
This is where climate debt can acquire populist meaning. When citizens feel that public institutions can afford external debt but not internal security against environmental insecurity, the line between economic and climate injustice becomes a political debate. The question becomes less “How much finance has been mobilized?” and more “Whose obligations are being prioritized?”
Zambia: When a Climate Shock Becomes a Fiscal Shock
Zambia illustrates an aspect of the issue, where environmental shocks rapidly turn into macro-economic and political shocks. The World Bank described the country’s 2024 drought as the driest in decades; it affected approximately 9.8 million people, with 6.6 million experiencing severe food insecurity. Likewise, Zambia’s reliance on hydropower worsened a major electricity crisis, and agricultural production was also greatly affected (World Bank, 2024).
These pressures were added to a challenging debt restructuring process. The World Bank then approved US$100 million to finance development policy and provide a support facility for catastrophe events, highlighting the need for liquidity in the event of a climate shock. However, there is a deep challenge that needs to be addressed: emergency funding can mitigate and repair harm in the short term, but it will not necessarily close gaps in the longer term in the resources needed to prepare for adaptation.
Climate events remain a downside risk to Zambia’s debt-service capacity, according to the IMF’s 2026 assessment. This connection has political importance, as it links environmental insecurity to the state’s fiscal stability. A succession of shocks may then alter citizens’ perceptions of national governments and the international financial system as a whole. When the climate is made insecure, it tests institutions’ capacity to offer security without adding another generation of debt.
Malawi: The Politics of Rebuilding the Same Future
Malawi’s experience with Cyclone Freddy makes the distributional stakes equally visible. According to the World Bank (2023), material losses amounted to about US$505 million, while production losses were around US$36.4 million, equivalent to about 0.5 percent of Malawi’s 2023 GDP. These statistics concealed the destruction of homes, disruption of agriculture, damage to infrastructure and loss of livelihoods.
Reconstruction is a tough decision for a budget-constrained government—balancing the social and political costs of leaving communities exposed with the financial costs of borrowing to rebuild. Governments could continue to pay for the impacts of climate hazards without sufficiently reducing the likelihood or impact of further loss.
This is why it is as important as the amount of climate finance as it is well-designed. A dollar of grant finance and a dollar of sovereign borrowing are not politically equivalent. They distribute obligations differently across time and across social groups. The former can build the community’s public capacity without adding to the repayment burden; the latter can shift some of today’s adaptation burden onto future taxpayers. Therefore, it is not only a matter of mobilizing resources, but of their financial architecture as well, that is, a matter of climate justice.
From Climate Victims to Climate Creditors
One of the most profound political changes may be conceptual. African countries have often been portrayed internationally as weak recipients that need help. This is becoming an outdated perspective. Climate-justice claims are increasingly becoming language of responsibility, entitlement and institutional change, rather than “help us because we are vulnerable”; it is becoming “recognition of what is owed because responsibility and harm are unequally distributed.”
Warlenius (2018) proposed a shift from emissions to questions of responsibility, atmospheric space, and compensation through the concept of climate debt, which emerged within climate-justice movements. This argument considers the intersection of the moral grammar of climate debt, current sovereign debt, and the lived reality of adaptation under fiscal constraint.
This suggests a politically viable possibility of reversal. African countries cannot be read only as clients of a lender who comes to them for help. They can also speak in a way that makes them claimants in a just climate order. The language of ‘climate creditors’ can help here as a political metaphor; it emphasises the historical and distributive aspects of climate responsibility, but does not suggest that African states have traditional financial claims against specific governments.
Making this distinction is crucial. Climate-creditor politics does not absolve African governments of responsibility. Vulnerability may be exacerbated by corruption, weak institutions, unsustainable borrowing patterns and poor public spending and African governments should be held accountable at home. There is no conflict between international responsibility and national accountability. They work at various levels of the same political economy.
The New Political Antagonism
At this point, climate debt populism is analytically useful. It recognises a type of political opposition based on the unequal division of financial responsibilities, where material climate insecurity is expressed in this way. The applicable political boundary is not definitive. It could be between citizens and national elites, vulnerable states and creditors or historically high emitters and climate-sensitive societies. In practice, these boundaries can overlap.
The risk is that such a politics can go in two extremely different directions. It can create a democratic politics of climate justice, calling for transparency in finance, reorganization of debt, and reparative responsibility and greater public accountability. However, it can also be seized by the political entrepreneur who simplifies the weave of politics to an unchecked story of foreign conspiracy, domestic betrayal or perpetual victimhood. The concept should not therefore be considered – normatively – as progressive or regressive.
It is a democratic question in that it raises a public debate over who is best positioned to determine who will bear the costs of climate change. Failing to involve citizens in designing climate finance through technical negotiations and institutions far removed from the people can create a legitimacy deficit with political repercussions. On the other hand, if climate finance is transparent, locally accountable, and clearly linked to social protection and adaptation outcomes, it can reinforce democratic trust.
Preserving the Natural World within the Context of Non-Debt-Creating Adaptation (COP31)
This debate comes at an opportune moment. Adaptation, finance, and loss and damage are key themes of the climate negotiations to be discussed at COP31, to be held in Antalya from 9-20 November 2026. African governments should thus ask not just how much money is pledged, but how much they will receive in the end. What forms of finance are being provided, on which terms and at what cost to future generations?
The answer matters because a climate finance target can be achieved in several ways that produce very different politics. A significant share of adaptation resources could be financed through loans, which may provide immediate financial support to vulnerable states but create future debt obligations. This finance can be beneficial in certain instances, especially when concessionality is high, and investments have a productive return. However, borrowing does not always align with climate justice.
A more believable framework for getting climate finance to Africa would thus be based on four pillars. First, adaptation finance really needs to be far more grant-based, especially in highly vulnerable countries with limited fiscal space. Second, the support for loss and damage should be on top of, not instead of, adaptation finance. Third, countries already experiencing unsustainable debt levels should have trustworthy debt-restructuring instruments, so climate shocks are not necessarily a source of additional debt crises. Finally, African countries and affected communities should be more influential in designing, allocating and monitoring climate finance.
In particular, the fourth principle is important. Wealth redistribution is not the only issue of climate justice between North and South. It is also about redistribution within countries. External resources can fuel inequality when they fall into the hands of political elites, are concentrated in capital-heavy projects, or are not tied to the communities most vulnerable to climate risks. This is why a just climate-finance architecture should link international and domestic responsibility, transparency, participation, and accountability.
Beyond the Politics of Vulnerability
The politics of African climate change is thus shifting away from a politics of vulnerability. The danger remains very real, but it is no longer politically sufficient. More and more governments, movements, and citizens are asking what vulnerability means in a global context where the conditions of climate change and climate impacts do not align with the distribution of financial means.
One possible political result of this contradiction is climate debt populism. It emerges when climate insecurity and debt insecurity become legible as parts of the same injustice, and when citizens interpret adaptation financing as a test of who counts, who owes, and who has the authority to determine the future. The idea thus includes a political element to a policy discussion that is frequently framed as a purely technical matter of climate finance.
The broader importance of the study is to move from the question “How much climate finance is needed in Africa” to “What political order is being reproduced in the provision of climate finance?” That question is more complex, as it deals with responsibility, power, debt, legitimacy, and distribution at the same time.
Africa does not need a regime of climate finance that makes adaptation possible today and harder to sustain in the years to come. Nor does it need a politics that converts legitimate climate grievances into simplistic blame. What is needed is a system in which the three aspects of historical responsibility, financial capacity, domestic accountability, and democratic participation are seen as interlinked aspects of climate justice.
The decisive test of climate finance is not whether money reaches vulnerable countries. It is whether that money enables them to become less vulnerable without increasing their debt. This is indeed the political issue of climate adaptation. The language of vulnerability is giving way to the language of entitlement in Africa’s climate politics: from “Save us from a crisis” to “acknowledge the distribution of responsibility for a crisis.” If that shift becomes politically salient, climate finance will no longer be a technocratic subfield of international development. It will be at the heart of the battle for global justice, global sovereignty and democratic legitimacy.
Who pays to adapt—and, in the emerging politics of climate debt, who actually owes whom?
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (2026). COP31. UNFCCC.
Warlenius, R. (2018). “Decolonizing the atmosphere: The climate justice movement on climate debt.” Development and Change, 49(2), 454–478. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12387
Who Pays to Adapt? Climate Debt and Populist Politics of Climate Justice in Africa
In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja uses the concept of “climate debt populism” to examine how climate vulnerability, sovereign debt, and distributive injustice are becoming politically intertwined across Africa. He argues that adaptation finance is not only a technical question of resource mobilization, but also a struggle over responsibility, legitimacy, and who ultimately bears the costs of climate survival. Drawing on examples from Senegal, Zambia, and Malawi, Dr. Solaja shows how climate shocks can intensify fiscal vulnerability, while debt servicing can restrict governments’ capacity to invest in resilience. He calls for a more just climate-finance architecture centered on grant-based adaptation, debt restructuring, accountability, participation, and recognition of Africa’s historically unequal contribution to global emissions
By Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja
Africa’s climate politics is entering a more consequential phase. The debate is no longer about whether vulnerable societies need adaptation finance, but how their political and financial relationship is shaped when they receive it through debt. The resources governments already have to service debt can create a paradox when small increases in debt are added to shield citizens from climate risks: the funds required to lessen vulnerability can create more vulnerability.
This commentary proposes the concept of ‘climate debt populism’ to reflect the political reasoning that can be forged from this paradox. I do not imply, in using the term, that there is an existing pan-African political movement, but rather use it as an analytical framework to examine the potential for linking climate vulnerability, fiscal pressure, and distributive injustice with the populist statement: communities that were least responsible for past greenhouse gas emissions should not bear the burden of additional fiscal costs just to be secure. This struggle is not fundamentally about people who want to act on climate change versus people who don’t. It is a conflict over who has the authority, responsibility, and resources to determine who pays for climate survival.
Why should those who contributed least to the climate crisis pay to survive it?
The Question Behind Climate Finance
Vulnerability is the language of climate change in Africa. With warming, droughts, flooding and food insecurity, adaptation is a pressing developmental need, with increasing water stress and disruption to livelihoods. But vulnerability is not the sole determinant of the politics of adaptation. The question of who pays for protection is becoming increasingly distributive: on whose conditions and at what cost to public finances and future generations?
The answer matters because Africa is in a unique position within the global climate economy. The continent has been responsible for a relatively small share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but faces the highest climate risks. According to the African Development Bank, Africa accounts for less than 4 percent of global emissions but receives only about 3 percent of global climate finance (AfDB, 2025). At the same time, many African countries struggle with limited fiscal space and high debt-service burdens. The outcome is a political economy where the need for adaptation meets the financial limits of the states that will be expected to provide it.
The problem is more than money. It’s about the conditions and modalities of climate finance. Grant financing can increase adaptive capacity without adding a new debt burden. Loans can offer short-term flexibility, but they can also shift the burden of financing adaptation to climate change into the future. The difference between resilience and recovery financing is a political question in situations of repeated climate shocks and additional borrowing.
Climate finance is thus not apolitical. It shares responsibilities among countries, generations and social groups. When people feel they are losing out because of climate change, and that public funding is being limited or restricted, finance becomes an issue of fairness and political legitimacy.
Changing the Conversation from Climate Populism to Climate Debt Populism
Climate debt populism is analytically different from the current discourse on climate populism and extends ideas in this conversation. Political representations of climate policy typically frame the issue as a clash between a righteous or derelict population and those who represent and are responsible for the environment and environmental transition policies, such as the state, the market, or the public interest. When the policy is contentious, as it becomes when measures like carbon pricing or subsidy reform and energy transition are felt to be economically burdensome, climate politics can get messy in these accounts.
Climate debt populism changes what is contended. Its main grievance might not be climate action. Instead, it’s about the inequity of funding climate action and climate harm. The conflict arises when the price of adaptation is seen as an indicator of an international order that is separate from responsibility and burden.
The populist logic may thus be expressed in three interconnected steps. First, a material injury is apparent: crops fail to produce, houses are destroyed by floodwater, electricity networks are weakened, livelihoods are lost, and public services are economically constrained. Second, the injury is read by making a moral judgment between those suffering and those seen to have disproportionate power to control the distribution of costs. Third, this distinction becomes a political demand for recognition, redistribution and accountability.
‘The elite’ concerned is therefore far less monolithic than in traditional national populist politics. It could involve national political and economic decision makers, foreign creditors, financial institutions, rich high-emitting countries and technocratic institutions thought to set the rules for accessing funding by vulnerable societies. This doesn’t mean these actors form a unified bloc. Instead, they can be symbolically linked in a popular story of unequal responsibility.
This matters because it avoids making the concept synonymous with anti-Westernism or with opposition to the international financial system. Climate debt populism is not a movement against debt, but a struggle about the legitimacy of an unequal burden of climate responsibility. Its basic moral principle is that adaptation costs should be assigned by considering historical responsibility, current exposure, and financial resources.
Debt Amplifies Climate Change as a Political Vulnerability
This political claim has material force through debt. According to ActionAid International’s analysis of 65 highly climate-vulnerable countries, in September 2026, these countries will have paid almost 25 times more on debt repayments than on climate action. It notes that debt servicing as a share of government revenue is estimated to consume about 65 percent in Global South countries and is about 225 times higher than the climate finance they receive via grants (ActionAid International, 2026). The statistics must be viewed with care as they are an amalgamation and do not represent a consistent African experience. Their importance, however, lies in the structural relationship they point to: obligations to repay fiscal resources can take up fiscal resources just when investment in adaptation has to increase.
The resulting mechanism is potentially self-reinforcing. High-severity climate events cause economic and physical damage. The funding of emergency relief, reconstruction and social protection in the face of the government must be made. If grants and concessional resources are insufficient, additional borrowing becomes attractive or unavoidable. This leaves less fiscal room for preventive investments because of debt-service obligations. Weak adaptation leaves communities exposed to subsequent shocks, which generate additional losses and renewed financing needs. Fiscal vulnerability can thus exacerbate climate risk, and climate risk can constrain capacity to reduce fiscal vulnerability.
This is not to say that climate change is solely responsible for debt crises in Africa. Sovereign debt is determined by domestic fiscal policies, commodity dependence, exchange-rate pressures, borrowing policies, governance, global interest rates and the structure of the international financial system. A credible argument in the name of climate justice must, therefore, withstand monocausal explanations. The more assertive position is that climate shocks exacerbate existing financial fragilities and can make an already challenging debt situation much tougher.
Senegal: When Debt Service Crowds Out Climate Ambition
Senegal is a case in point for the inseparability of politics and fiscal capacity in climate finance. According to ActionAid’s 2026 analysis, Senegal’s debt servicing is more than 96 percent of government revenue and over 600 times its planned spending on climate action. For every US$1 budgeted for climate action, US$605 is being spent on debt servicing, according to the calculation. The exact proportion should be regarded as a representation of the fiscal structure of a particular advocacy organization, and not as a yardstick for the country’s fiscal structure. Its political significance nevertheless remains striking.
Fiscal constraint is not a macroeconomic phenomenon, but a condition that affects citizens engaged in agriculture and reliant on infrastructure and functioning public services. It is felt when there is a risk, and the state is unable to protect people. A farmer confronting declining productivity does not experience sovereign debt as a balance-sheet category. The experience is mediated through access to irrigation, agricultural support, roads, electricity, social protection and the state’s capacity to respond when climate shocks occur.
This is where climate debt can acquire populist meaning. When citizens feel that public institutions can afford external debt but not internal security against environmental insecurity, the line between economic and climate injustice becomes a political debate. The question becomes less “How much finance has been mobilized?” and more “Whose obligations are being prioritized?”
Zambia: When a Climate Shock Becomes a Fiscal Shock
Zambia illustrates an aspect of the issue, where environmental shocks rapidly turn into macro-economic and political shocks. The World Bank described the country’s 2024 drought as the driest in decades; it affected approximately 9.8 million people, with 6.6 million experiencing severe food insecurity. Likewise, Zambia’s reliance on hydropower worsened a major electricity crisis, and agricultural production was also greatly affected (World Bank, 2024).
These pressures were added to a challenging debt restructuring process. The World Bank then approved US$100 million to finance development policy and provide a support facility for catastrophe events, highlighting the need for liquidity in the event of a climate shock. However, there is a deep challenge that needs to be addressed: emergency funding can mitigate and repair harm in the short term, but it will not necessarily close gaps in the longer term in the resources needed to prepare for adaptation.
Climate events remain a downside risk to Zambia’s debt-service capacity, according to the IMF’s 2026 assessment. This connection has political importance, as it links environmental insecurity to the state’s fiscal stability. A succession of shocks may then alter citizens’ perceptions of national governments and the international financial system as a whole. When the climate is made insecure, it tests institutions’ capacity to offer security without adding another generation of debt.
Malawi: The Politics of Rebuilding the Same Future
Malawi’s experience with Cyclone Freddy makes the distributional stakes equally visible. According to the World Bank (2023), material losses amounted to about US$505 million, while production losses were around US$36.4 million, equivalent to about 0.5 percent of Malawi’s 2023 GDP. These statistics concealed the destruction of homes, disruption of agriculture, damage to infrastructure and loss of livelihoods.
Reconstruction is a tough decision for a budget-constrained government—balancing the social and political costs of leaving communities exposed with the financial costs of borrowing to rebuild. Governments could continue to pay for the impacts of climate hazards without sufficiently reducing the likelihood or impact of further loss.
This is why it is as important as the amount of climate finance as it is well-designed. A dollar of grant finance and a dollar of sovereign borrowing are not politically equivalent. They distribute obligations differently across time and across social groups. The former can build the community’s public capacity without adding to the repayment burden; the latter can shift some of today’s adaptation burden onto future taxpayers. Therefore, it is not only a matter of mobilizing resources, but of their financial architecture as well, that is, a matter of climate justice.
From Climate Victims to Climate Creditors
One of the most profound political changes may be conceptual. African countries have often been portrayed internationally as weak recipients that need help. This is becoming an outdated perspective. Climate-justice claims are increasingly becoming language of responsibility, entitlement and institutional change, rather than “help us because we are vulnerable”; it is becoming “recognition of what is owed because responsibility and harm are unequally distributed.”
Warlenius (2018) proposed a shift from emissions to questions of responsibility, atmospheric space, and compensation through the concept of climate debt, which emerged within climate-justice movements. This argument considers the intersection of the moral grammar of climate debt, current sovereign debt, and the lived reality of adaptation under fiscal constraint.
This suggests a politically viable possibility of reversal. African countries cannot be read only as clients of a lender who comes to them for help. They can also speak in a way that makes them claimants in a just climate order. The language of ‘climate creditors’ can help here as a political metaphor; it emphasises the historical and distributive aspects of climate responsibility, but does not suggest that African states have traditional financial claims against specific governments.
Making this distinction is crucial. Climate-creditor politics does not absolve African governments of responsibility. Vulnerability may be exacerbated by corruption, weak institutions, unsustainable borrowing patterns and poor public spending and African governments should be held accountable at home. There is no conflict between international responsibility and national accountability. They work at various levels of the same political economy.
The New Political Antagonism
At this point, climate debt populism is analytically useful. It recognises a type of political opposition based on the unequal division of financial responsibilities, where material climate insecurity is expressed in this way. The applicable political boundary is not definitive. It could be between citizens and national elites, vulnerable states and creditors or historically high emitters and climate-sensitive societies. In practice, these boundaries can overlap.
The risk is that such a politics can go in two extremely different directions. It can create a democratic politics of climate justice, calling for transparency in finance, reorganization of debt, and reparative responsibility and greater public accountability. However, it can also be seized by the political entrepreneur who simplifies the weave of politics to an unchecked story of foreign conspiracy, domestic betrayal or perpetual victimhood. The concept should not therefore be considered – normatively – as progressive or regressive.
It is a democratic question in that it raises a public debate over who is best positioned to determine who will bear the costs of climate change. Failing to involve citizens in designing climate finance through technical negotiations and institutions far removed from the people can create a legitimacy deficit with political repercussions. On the other hand, if climate finance is transparent, locally accountable, and clearly linked to social protection and adaptation outcomes, it can reinforce democratic trust.
Preserving the Natural World within the Context of Non-Debt-Creating Adaptation (COP31)
This debate comes at an opportune moment. Adaptation, finance, and loss and damage are key themes of the climate negotiations to be discussed at COP31, to be held in Antalya from 9-20 November 2026. African governments should thus ask not just how much money is pledged, but how much they will receive in the end. What forms of finance are being provided, on which terms and at what cost to future generations?
The answer matters because a climate finance target can be achieved in several ways that produce very different politics. A significant share of adaptation resources could be financed through loans, which may provide immediate financial support to vulnerable states but create future debt obligations. This finance can be beneficial in certain instances, especially when concessionality is high, and investments have a productive return. However, borrowing does not always align with climate justice.
A more believable framework for getting climate finance to Africa would thus be based on four pillars. First, adaptation finance really needs to be far more grant-based, especially in highly vulnerable countries with limited fiscal space. Second, the support for loss and damage should be on top of, not instead of, adaptation finance. Third, countries already experiencing unsustainable debt levels should have trustworthy debt-restructuring instruments, so climate shocks are not necessarily a source of additional debt crises. Finally, African countries and affected communities should be more influential in designing, allocating and monitoring climate finance.
In particular, the fourth principle is important. Wealth redistribution is not the only issue of climate justice between North and South. It is also about redistribution within countries. External resources can fuel inequality when they fall into the hands of political elites, are concentrated in capital-heavy projects, or are not tied to the communities most vulnerable to climate risks. This is why a just climate-finance architecture should link international and domestic responsibility, transparency, participation, and accountability.
Beyond the Politics of Vulnerability
The politics of African climate change is thus shifting away from a politics of vulnerability. The danger remains very real, but it is no longer politically sufficient. More and more governments, movements, and citizens are asking what vulnerability means in a global context where the conditions of climate change and climate impacts do not align with the distribution of financial means.
One possible political result of this contradiction is climate debt populism. It emerges when climate insecurity and debt insecurity become legible as parts of the same injustice, and when citizens interpret adaptation financing as a test of who counts, who owes, and who has the authority to determine the future. The idea thus includes a political element to a policy discussion that is frequently framed as a purely technical matter of climate finance.
The broader importance of the study is to move from the question “How much climate finance is needed in Africa” to “What political order is being reproduced in the provision of climate finance?” That question is more complex, as it deals with responsibility, power, debt, legitimacy, and distribution at the same time.
Africa does not need a regime of climate finance that makes adaptation possible today and harder to sustain in the years to come. Nor does it need a politics that converts legitimate climate grievances into simplistic blame. What is needed is a system in which the three aspects of historical responsibility, financial capacity, domestic accountability, and democratic participation are seen as interlinked aspects of climate justice.
The decisive test of climate finance is not whether money reaches vulnerable countries. It is whether that money enables them to become less vulnerable without increasing their debt. This is indeed the political issue of climate adaptation. The language of vulnerability is giving way to the language of entitlement in Africa’s climate politics: from “Save us from a crisis” to “acknowledge the distribution of responsibility for a crisis.” If that shift becomes politically salient, climate finance will no longer be a technocratic subfield of international development. It will be at the heart of the battle for global justice, global sovereignty and democratic legitimacy.
Who pays to adapt—and, in the emerging politics of climate debt, who actually owes whom?
References
ActionAid International. (2026, September 16). Debt fuels the climate crisis: How the finance flows. https://actionaid.org/publications/2026/debt-fuels-climate-crisis
African Development Bank. (2025). African Economic Outlook 2025. https://www.afdb.org/sites/default/files/documents/publications/afdb25-01_aeo_highlights_english_020625.pdf
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