Latin America

There is currently a North-South gap in discussions on peacebuilding financing, despite the fact that emerging powers are playing an increasingly important role in fragile and conflict-affected countries. Now is the moment to create opportunities for mutual engagement, coordination, and learning.

Energy subsidies are one of the few domains where there is a near full-throated consensus among progressives, governments, and economists over the need for reform. Nearly everywhere, energy subsidies are regressive, vastly favoring the car-and energy-consuming parts of the population that are the least in need. The costs of these subsidies can vary, but in many countries, they represent a large fiscal burden. Prior to its 2005 reforms, for example, Indonesia's fuel subsidy was nearly the same amount as its health budget and its targeted anti-poverty programs combined. From the perspective of global climate change, few economic policies are as damaging as the direct and indirect contributions of fossil fuel subsidies.

The global pandemic has laid bare the digital inequities across vertical (income) and horizontal (social, political, and identity) dimensions, while exposing the extent to which pre-pandemic approaches to bridging the digital divide have been dominated by economic considerations even while they are not universally treated as policy priorities.

With each new year of data, and each new intergovernmental report, it becomes harder to deny the scale and urgency of the energy transition required to prevent catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges countries to take action to prevent a rise in temperature by more than 1.5°C, and warns of catastrophic consequences of a rise above 2°C. Yet current policies and pledges fall far short of hitting these targets.