Development assistance rules are denying “vulnerable” small island developing states, or SIDS, of the help they need to combat the climate emergency and must be rewritten, a U.K. inquiry has been told.
Multiple organizations have attacked the primary eligibility criteria for official development assistance, or ODA, and concessional loans — which are a country’s income per capita — claiming it penalizes those island nations that are in dire need of finance as the climate threat grows.
In written evidence submitted to the U.K. Parliament’s International Development Committee last month, Directors of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative, or RESI, an advisory network, called it a “terrible measure” with “perverse outcomes,” while the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat demanded “wholesale changes in the International Financial architecture.”