GENEVA - Unprecedented cuts to global aid and intensifying attacks on multilateralism are undermining decades of progress in the fight against poverty, the UN's poverty expert warned today.
"As countries turn their backs on international cooperation, we are witnessing a terrifying domino effect of cuts to global aid, with one country after the next announcing major reductions to their aid budgets," said Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
In his new report to the UN Human Rights Council, De Schutter urged governments attending next week's Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) in Seville, Spain (30 June - 3 July), to prioritise financing social protection through wealth taxes, 'solidarity levies' and other innovative financing tools to prevent further backsliding.
"The world order that emerged from the horrors of the Second World War has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. In just a few short months, that progress has begun to wildly unravel," the Special Rapporteur said.
"It is a sad reflection of our times that money once earmarked for life-saving development programmes are now being redirected to defence and military spending."
Official development assistance fell in 2024 for the first time in six years, with predictions estimating a drop of almost 20% for 2025. In his report, the expert detailed how these cuts are hampering humanitarian assistance and deepening poverty, leaving vulnerable populations increasingly exposed to the intensifying climate crisis.
"It is a perfect storm: cuts to global aid as the climate crisis ramps up and wipes out people's entire livelihoods and assets in mere minutes," De Schutter said.
The Special Rapporteur called on governments meeting at FFD4 to adopt alternative financing mechanisms, including international tax reform and 'solidarity levies' on sectors such as transport and finance, managed through a Global Fund for Social Protection, to ensure long-term and predictable funding of social protection in the Global South.
"It is in countries that are least responsible for climate change that people have the worst access to social protection systems that could shield them from its impacts," the expert said. "Over 90% of people in the world's poorest countries lack any form of social protection whatsoever, leaving them entirely unprotected."
The expert pointed to calculations he presented in advance of FFD4 demonstrating how the international community could raise US$759.6 billion a year - more than twice the amount required to provide the world's 26 lowest-income countries with the essential healthcare and basic income security that would safeguard people in poverty from the impacts of climate change.
"Social protection is increasingly recognised as our greatest tool in the fight against poverty - and is proving just as powerful in protecting people in poverty from the climate disasters that are becoming part of their daily lives," he said.
"By championing the financing of social protection, world leaders meeting at FFD4 would be taking a powerful stand against today's deplorable attempts to upend the international order, ignore the climate crisis and abandon the world's poorest people," De Schutter said.
