In a significant step toward climate financing, a group of countries including France, Kenya, Spain, and Barbados on Monday pledged to impose taxes on premium-class air travel and private jets to help raise funds for climate action and sustainable development.
As many richer nations scale back official development aid for countries even as extreme weather events increase in frequency and severity, some are looking to find new sources of finance, including by taxing polluting industries.
Improving Green Taxation
The announcement, made on the opening day of a major UN development summit in Seville, Spain, marked one of the first key commitments under the newly launched “Sevilla Platform for Action”, which aims to advance a renewed global financing framework to support climate action and sustainable development goals.
“The aim is to help improve green taxation and foster international solidarity by promoting more progressive and harmonised tax systems,” the office of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a statement.
‘Important Step’
The initiative, which was co-signed by Sierra Leone, Benin and Somalia, will get technical support from the European Commission, it added.
All are members of the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, launched in November 2023 to explore new forms of taxation that could help support developing countries’ efforts to decarbonise and protect themselves against the impacts of climate change.
As well as an aviation tax, which could raise billions of dollars, the task force said in a recent report, that other sectors that could potentially be taxed more include shipping, oil and gas, cryptocurrencies and the super-rich.
Rebecca Newsom of environmentalist group Greenpeace called the move “an important step towards ensuring that the binge users of this undertaxed sector are made to pay their fair share”.
She added that the “obvious” next step was to hold oil and gas corporations to account.
(With inputs from Reuters)
