The costs of battling climate change are increasing for the world’s poorest communities, as they struggle with more extreme weather patterns and insufficient aid, the United Kingdom-based aid group Oxfam said on Monday.
“People in Mozambique and the Horn of Africa are facing mounting human and financial costs from climate-related disasters they did least to create,” Oxfam said in a statement.
A new report by Oxfam showed that the 48 least developed countries in the world are receiving between $2.4bn to $3.4bn a year to cope with disastrous climate events, equivalent to approximately $3 per person annually or less than one cent per person each day.
This is despite the fact that people in these countries contribute less to carbon emissions compared with the average United States citizen. The average footprint of the richest one percent of people globally could be 175 times that of the poorest, Oxfam said.
The report coincides with a major United Nations climate summit in which Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will push countries to increase their greenhouse gas reduction targets.
