Debt Crisis undermining the Right to Education by UNESCO, Education Cannot Wait, agencies   July 2026   The Global South is being forced to choose creditors over children, highlights Ilan Kapoor, Professor of Critical Development Studies at York University, Toronto.   "The world claims to regard education as a universal right. Its financial system tells a different story. ⁠New figures released by UNESCO show that 113 countries with a total population of 6.1 billion now spend more on servicing debt than educating their people.   In low-income countries, debt payments are nearly four times education expenditure. In 18 of the most heavily indebted countries, governments spend at least five times more on debt than on education.   These are not merely signs of strained public finances. They reveal a stark political hierarchy.   Creditors possess enforceable claims on government revenues. Children possess declarations, development goals and promises. When the two collide, creditors are paid first.   The consequences are visible in overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating school buildings, teacher shortages, unaffordable school fees and children leaving education prematurely. Yet these outcomes are generally described as funding gaps or failures of domestic governance, as though governments had freely decided to neglect their schools.   In reality, many governments are operating inside an international financial order that sharply restricts what they can choose.   The ⁠World Bank reports that developing countries transferred $741bn more to external creditors in principal and interest between 2022 and 2024 than they received in new financing. This was the largest net debt outflow in at least 50 years. In 2024 alone, low and middle-income countries paid a record $415bn in interest.   In other words, the financial flows are frequently moving in the opposite direction from the one suggested by the language of development assistance.   Poorer countries are commonly portrayed as beneficiaries of Western generosity. But vast amounts of public wealth are travelling from debtor countries to bondholders, commercial banks, multilateral institutions and wealthier creditor governments.   Money that could hire teachers, provide school meals or build classrooms is instead leaving the country.   This is particularly perverse because education is not simply another item of government consumption. It is an investment in a society’s future capacities. Cutting it may make debt payments easier today, but it will weaken productivity, public revenues and social resilience tomorrow.   Debt contracts are treated as binding obligations whose breach can trigger credit downgrades, capital flight, lawsuits and exclusion from financial markets. The right to education, by contrast, carries no comparable machinery of enforcement.   No ratings agency downgrades creditors when a country cannot afford enough teachers. No financial penalty is imposed on bondholders when debt service forces children out of school. Markets do not panic when classrooms collapse.   The system disciplines governments for failing creditors, not for failing children.   UNESCO has proposed expanding debt-for-education swaps. Under these arrangements, a creditor cancels or restructures part of a country’s debt in exchange for government investment in agreed educational programmes.   Such initiatives can produce tangible gains. A 2023 agreement with France helped Ivory Coast finance more than 30 schools in underserved areas. A German agreement with Egypt supported school feeding and basic services, while an earlier Spain-Peru programme funded education projects across vulnerable regions.   These programmes are worthwhile. But they are not a solution to the larger debt crisis. Debt swaps typically cover only a small fraction of what countries owe. They are negotiated selectively, depend on creditor consent and may add new layers of external monitoring to domestic spending.   Most importantly, they leave untouched the principle that creditors are entitled to repayment unless they voluntarily concede otherwise.   The question becomes how to persuade creditors to permit a little more education, rather than why the claims of creditors should take priority in the first place.   That question is especially urgent because education aid is also falling. UNESCO projects that international assistance for education could decline by as much as 30 percent between 2023 and 2027.   Debtor countries are therefore being squeezed from both sides: aid is retreating while debt payments continue.   The familiar recommendation that developing countries should mobilise more domestic resources is inadequate. Progressive taxation and reduced corruption matter. But additional revenues will not transform education systems if they are immediately diverted towards debts contracted at high interest rates, or made more expensive by currency depreciation.   Nor can the problem be solved by demanding ever more austerity. Education budgets consist largely of recurring expenditure, especially teachers’ salaries.   When governments are instructed to freeze public-sector wage bills, they cannot solve teacher shortages or expand access, however often international institutions proclaim education a priority.   A more serious response would begin with large-scale debt cancellation for countries in distress, automatic suspension of payments during economic and climate emergencies, far cheaper concessional financing and a fair multilateral mechanism for restructuring sovereign debt.   At present, debt negotiations are fragmented among private creditors, bilateral lenders and international institutions. Debtor governments must bargain with powerful financial actors while trying to avoid being punished for seeking relief.   A binding United Nations framework for sovereign debt could establish shared rules, require both borrowers and lenders to act responsibly and prevent holdout creditors from obstructing restructuring. It could also make social rights central to assessments of what a country can genuinely afford to repay.   The world needs to move towards the idea that debt repayment cannot come at any human cost. A debt is not sustainable when paying it requires dismantling the institutions on which a society’s future depends".   http://www.unesco.org/en/articles/transforming-education-summit-unesco-mobilizes-leaders-113-countries-spend-more-debt-payments http://www.unesco.org/gem-report/en/aid-education http://giescr.org/en/our-work/on-the-ground/we-join-civil-society-submission-to-un-special-rapporteur-on-debt-crisis-undermining-the-right-to-education   June 2026   Breaking Barriers: Understanding Educational Exclusion in Crises – Global estimates 2026   The latest global estimates from Education Cannot Wait (ECW) reveal that 258 million school-aged children and adolescents across 87 countries have their education affected by crises. Of these, 93 million are entirely out of school, while millions more remain enrolled but struggle to learn under conditions that undermine their progress and increase their risk of dropping out.   The report provides new evidence on where needs are greatest, who is being left behind and the barriers preventing children from accessing and completing their education. It finds that educational exclusion is highly concentrated, with 182 million crisis-affected children – including 74 million out-of-school children – living in the world's 20 most severe crisis contexts.   Drawing on the latest available data, the report highlights the urgent need to invest not only in access to education, but also in foundational learning, retention and progression. Without decisive action, learning losses will continue to deepen, putting an entire generation at risk.   http://www.educationcannotwait.org/resource-library/breaking-barriers-understanding-educational-exclusion-in-crises-global-estimates http://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025/11/24/aid-cuts-kids-caretakers-are-clear-about-what-save-education http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/global-funding-cuts-could-force-6-million-more-children-out-school-coming-year http://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2025/09/dhc-al-nashif-open-ended-intergovernmental-working-group-optional http://giescr.org/en/our-work/on-the-ground/we-joined-over-190-organisations-in-global-call-to-protect-education-financing http://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/32736:funding-the-future-education-unions-students-and-civil-society-mobilise-to-boost-global-education-financing http://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/32765:privatisation-threatens-young-childrens-rights-unions-and-partners-call-for-urgent-public-investment-in-early-childhood-education http://campaignforeducation.org/focus-area/financing-education/ http://www.cesr.org/financing-the-right-to-education-for-peace-equality-and-a-rightsbased-economy http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/news/education-day2025 http://www.unhcr.org/what-we-do/build-better-futures/education http://www.warchild.net/intervention-cwtl/ http://plan-international.org/publications/still-we-dream/ http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nearly-quarter-billion-childrens-schooling-was-disrupted-climate-crises-2024-unicef http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/not-new-normal-2024-one-worst-years-unicefs-history-children-conflict http://www.prio.org/comments/1152
	2.4 billion workers exposed to excessive heat. Too hot to work, can't afford to stop by IIED, ILO, GCSPF, agencies International Institute for Environment and Development, agencies   July 2026   Extreme heat is acting as a “poverty multiplier” for hundreds of millions of workers in India’s informal sector, researchers from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) report.   The IIED research estimated that each year, 21.1 working days were lost in India due to extreme heat, an unaffordable loss for many of the 550 million workers in the informal sector.   Ritu Bharadwaj, climate finance director at the IIED, said the research showed how extreme heat was deepening poverty and worsening existing structural inequalities in India, which is aiming to be a developed nation in the next two decades.   “Heat is quietly pushing these families deeper into poverty. As the heat rises, their efficiency goes down, so they earn less. With lower income their food intake falls. And because they cannot afford to stop, they keep working through it, doing lasting damage to their health. They are paying for a crisis they did nothing to cause, with their health and with their savings.”   Human-caused climate breakdown is making every heatwave in the world more intense and more likely to happen. India, a country where nine out of 10 work in the informal economy, could become one of the first places where heatwaves break the human survivability limit, a World Bank report said.   The world's over 2 billion informal workers include some of the most socially and economically marginalised people, who lack employment security, obliging them to work through illness and endure unsafe working conditions.   Access to drinking water, shade, rest areas, sanitation and medical support at the worksite was poor, the report revealed. Many workers then returned to homes that provided “no relief from heat”.   With its frequency, intensity and duration increasing due to climate change, extreme heat has become one of the world’s most widespread occupational hazards. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 2.41 billion workers— 71% of the global workforce — are exposed to excessive heat at some point during their work, a share that has risen steadily since 2000.   Heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related deaths, and studies covering 2000–2019 attribute around 489,000 deaths a year to heat, 45% of them in Asia (WHO, 2024). Behind these mortality figures sits a much larger burden of illness, injury and lost earning capacity that rarely appears in any official assessment.   India sits at the higher end of this crisis. The India Meteorological Department (IMD recorded 2024 as the country’s warmest year since records began in 1901, with 37 cities crossing 45°C between March and June . The ILO projects that heat stress will reduce India’s working hours by 5.8% in 2030, a productivity loss equivalent to 34 million full-time jobs (ILO, 2019). These losses fall overwhelmingly on informal workers.   Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data for 2023–2024 show that 58.4% of Indian workers are self-employed and a further 19.8% are casual labourers. It is this informal workforce that labours in the occupations where the body is the main productive asset, such as construction, brick making, road building, rickshaw pulling, loading and small-scale manufacturing.   For informal workers, heat exposure translates directly into lost earnings, illness and reduced productivity. A daily wage labourer who misses work because of heat-related illness, a brick moulder whose output falls during the hottest months or a garment worker who slows down in an overheated factory all experience immediate income losses.   And it is largely these workers and their households who bear these losses, absorbing them through borrowing, reduced consumption or delayed healthcare, with little compensation or protection.   Heat exposure is not confined to outdoor work. Workers in garment units, glass factories and small workshops often labour for long hours in poorly ventilated, heat-trapping spaces where temperatures can be as severe as those outdoors.   And exposure does not end when their shift finishes. Many workers return to overcrowded homes with tin roofs that retain heat late into the night, leaving little opportunity for recovery before the next working day. Understanding heat exposure therefore requires looking beyond the workplace to the wider conditions in which workers live.   The policy response so far has not matched the nature of the problem. Insurance-based income protection schemes —including products that trigger payments when temperatures exceed a threshold — represent an important innovation. But payouts are often too small relative to earnings lost and are typically not received until after the heat event has passed. More fundamentally, such schemes compensate a fraction of the losses and do not address the conditions that force people to continue working through dangerous heat or the longer-term impacts on health and productivity.   The situation in India is no different from many other countries and regions. Across South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, developing and low-income countries with large informal workforces face the same combination of rising heat, physically demanding work and weak social protection.   Evidence on what works in India can directly provide learnings for them. Many developed countries have also started to face the heat. Europe recorded an estimated 61,672 heat-related excess deaths in the summer of 2022, and occupational heat exposure is rising faster in Europe and Central Asia than any other region (WHO, 2024; ILO, 2024).   As outdoor and indoor work everywhere gets hotter, the question we are addressing through this report is how to protect workers’ health and incomes in ways that can allow them to stop working when conditions become dangerous.   The study ‘Too hot to work, too poor to rest’ examines the health and economic impacts of heat stress on informal workers in four South Asian cities: Ajmer, Delhi and Agra in India, and Dhaka in Bangladesh. It surveyed over 700 workers across outdoor settings such as construction, road work, brick kilns and rickshaw pulling, and indoor settings such as garment, glass and small-scale manufacturing. The survey was supplemented by time motion studies, health risk scoring validated by local doctors, focus group discussions, key informant interviews and family case studies.   The findings draw attention to three issues that much of the existing research overlooks:   Indoor workers are as vulnerable as those working outdoors, even though far fewer studies examine their conditions. Heat exposure does not end at the worksite: poor housing, sanitation, water and food mean that a worker who spends eight or nine hours labouring in the heat returns home to conditions that provide no respite, and The costs are more than economic loss and damage: heat stress carries significant non-economic and psychological harm that rarely appears in assessments.   The research shows how heat stress creates a hidden cycle of loss that ranges from workers' daily earnings to their long-term health, and from the household to the wider economy. The papers also set out recommendations for protecting workers and their incomes, including how compensation and insurance-based approaches compare.   http://www.iied.org/too-hot-work-too-poor-rest http://www.iied.org/extreme-heat-costing-indian-workers-billions-lost-wages http://www.peoplescourageinternational.org/pdfs/HotCitiesReport.pdf http://www.wiego.org/project/climate-change-urban-informal-economy http://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/29/extreme-heat-deaths-india-climate-crisis-environment http://www.ipsnews.net/2025/06/south-asian-cities-faced-relentless-record-breaking-heatwaves-last-year/ http://www.citiesalliance.org/resources/publications/publications/climate-finance-urban-poor-review-global-climate-funds http://sdinet.org/   Sep. 2024   Governments must do more to utilize universal social protection to adapt to and mitigate the impact of climate change. (ILO)   The World Social Protection Report 2024-26: Universal social protection for climate action and a just transition finds that in the 20 countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis, 91.3 per cent of people (364 million) lack any form of social protection.   Looking more broadly, in the 50 most climate-vulnerable countries, 75 per cent of the population (2.1 billion people) lack any social protection coverage.   Globally, most children (76.1 per cent) still have no effective social protection coverage. There is also a substantial gender gap, with women’s effective coverage lagging behind men’s coverage.   These gaps are especially significant, given the potential role of social protection in softening the impact of climate change, helping people and societies adapt to a new climate-volatile reality, and facilitating a just transition to a sustainable future.   "Climate change does not recognize borders, and we cannot build a wall to keep the crisis out. The climate crisis affects us all and represents the single, gravest, threat to social justice today,” said Gilbert Houngbo, ILO Director-General.   “Many of the countries experiencing the most brutal consequences of this crisis are particularly ill-equipped to handle its environmental and livelihood consequences. We must recognize that what happens to impacted communities will affect us all".   Despite its role as a catalyst and an enabler of positive climate action, governments are failing to make the most of social protection’s potential, largely because of persistent coverage gaps and significant underinvestment.   On average, countries spend 12.9 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on social protection (excluding health). However, while high-income countries spend an average of 16.2 per cent, low-income countries allocate only 0.8 per cent of their GDP to social protection.   Low-income countries – which include states most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change – need an additional US$308.5 billion per year (52.3 per cent of their GDP) to guarantee at least basic social protection, and international support will be needed to reach this goal.   The report calls for decisive and integrated policy action to close protection gaps, arguing that, “it is time to up the ante” and invest significantly in social protection.   The report offers important recommendations to help guide policy and ensure effective and sustainable outcomes, including:   Preparing for both ‘routine’ life cycle risks, as well as climate-related shocks by having social protection systems in place ex-ante by ensuring everyone enjoys adequate social protection. Using social protection to support climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts and secure public acceptance of those measures. Prioritizing investment in social protection, including external support for countries with limited fiscal space.   http://www.ilo.org/publications/flagship-reports/world-social-protection-report-2024-26-universal-social-protection-climate   The critical role of social protection in strengthening resilience to climate change - Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors   This policy brief argues for a strategic use of climate funding, and in particular for its use in strengthening rights-based social protection systems.   Social protection is an important mechanism in managing climate-change related risks and their social and economic consequences as a short-term response to extreme weather events, but also supports people in adapting to climate change in the long-term.   1. Introduction   The right to social security is recognized in numerous human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A fundamental human right, social security is a potent tool to combat discrimination and an essential instrument for reducing poverty and promoting social inclusion. It aims to provide income security and support at every stage of life for everyone, with particular attention to the most marginalized.   Social protection is interpreted as broader than social security and has many forms. It incorporates non-statutory or informal measures for providing social security, but encompasses traditional social security measures such as benefits, social assistance and social insurance. It includes regular systematised benefits of cash and in-kind transfers, public works programmes, social welfare services, health schemes, social insurance schemes, training and employment schemes.   Social protection has a critical role in helping individuals and communities to manage risks. Social protection systems allow people to reduce and cope with social and economic risks over their life span, such as illness, income loss due to disability, old age, death and injury.   They also provide support in the face of collective impacts and risks, including pandemics, economic downturns and the adverse effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events (storms, floods), slow onset events (sea level rise, desertification, droughts) and other climate change-related losses and damages.   Over the past two decades, climate change has altered and significantly exacerbated both individual and collective risks and impacts. Climate change effects are felt worldwide, but it is the most vulnerable population groups in low-income countries who are disproportionally exposed to climate-change related risks. Particularly at risk are small scale famers and fishing communities, indigenous peoples and poor people generally, both urban and rural.   Those most affected not only live in high risk-prone areas but work under precarious social and economic conditions. Climate change has direct impacts on their livelihoods, especially agriculture and fishing. Their contributions to the causes of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions are negligible, but they are the most exposed to its most damaging impacts. At the same time, they have fewer resources to cope and adapt to climate change.   Strengthening social protection systems, especially in those countries most affected by climate risk, is a contribution to climate justice. As we strive toward climate justice for all people in all countries, investment in social protection system building with climate finance mechanisms should form part of nationally determined action to mitigate climate change effects.   This policy brief argues for a strategic use of climate funding, and in particular for its use in strengthening rights-based social protection systems. Social protection is an important mechanism in managing climate-change related risks and their social and economic consequences as a short-term response to extreme weather events, but also supports people in adapting to climate change in the long-term.   The critical role of social protection in strengthening resilience to climate change has been recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which recommends that climate adaptation should be integrated into social protection programmes (IPCC 2022).   2. Why social protection in a climate change context?   Social protection has an important role in strengthening the resilience to climate change in various ways:   Anticipation: Social protection helps people to better anticipate and mitigate the consequences of climate change by reducing their exposure and vulnerability. Regular cash benefits, cash for work or cash-plus programmes, for example, enable people to diversify livelihood strategies (e.g. by combining agricultural and non-agricultural elements), or to invest in preventive measures (e.g. improving irrigation, building dams).   Joining a social health insurance scheme or an unemployment protection scheme reduces vulnerability. In addition, rights-based, comprehensive and universal social protection can reduce climate vulnerability by addressing underlying issues of structural inequality that leave various groups, such as women and girls, persons with disability and older people, more exposed to the negative impacts of climate change.   Absorption: Social protection systems have a critical role in enabling individuals and communities to cope with and react to shocks. In the context of sudden onset disasters, such as floods or cyclones, quick and reliable payments of cash, in-kind transfers or insurance benefits play an important role in smoothing income and stabilizing livelihoods.   Social protection helps recipients maintain or restore their asset base, enabling them to recover more rapidly from crisis-situations than non-beneficiaries. Well-established social protection systems are able to respond to crises, for example, by temporarily expanding coverage to include all people hit by a shock or by increasing transfer values in order to enable people to withstand temporary emergencies (for example the Hunger Safety Net in Kenya).   If social protection systems are in place, strengthened and prepared to deal with an increasing number of collective shocks, there will be less need to set up ad hoc structures for emergency relief.   Adaptation: Social protection may help individuals, households and systems to strengthen their adaptive capacity to resist climate change in the long-term. It helps by supporting them to build up and invest in assets, diversify them, and improve their understanding of climate-related information for improved adaptation, for example by changing the planting patterns of their crops.   This is especially relevant when people are facing slow onset risks – that is, risks that evolve and become more severe over time, such as rising sea levels, changing rainfall patterns, land degradation or saltwater intrusion.   Social protection mechanisms can be linked to climate-specific measures. For example, in Ethiopia, India and Mexico public works programmes provide income support for recipients while building ecological resilience through the rehabilitation or enhancement of the natural resource base, such as watershed-management, afforestation programmes or irrigation work.   In Brazil, the Bolsa Verde (Green Grant) programme encourages recipients to conserve the ecosystem through zero deforestation in exchange for cash and provides complementary training programmes for alternative land use and employment opportunities.   Transformation: People’s capacity to manage climate change risk is largely determined by structural factors. Inequality and discrimination related to socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, disability, age and location, constrains access to resources, such as access to land, to markets, to basic services or even to climate-change related information.   In addition, crises also tend to exacerbate inequalities, widening already existing gaps. Integrated social protection systems that address and are sensitive to these inter-related structural inequalities are effective ways to integrate, redistribute, and reduce inequality of opportunities, helping to build up transformative capacities.   Strengthening access of women to productive resources, increasing their bargaining power at household and community level or providing age and gender-sensitive information and training on livelihoods adaptation strategies are good examples.   Social protection can facilitate “just transitions”, that is, it can help to reshape economies and the bargaining power of sectors within them, by supporting a better alignment of workers’ social rights and the shift to a green economy (ILO 2015). Social protection has a critical role in supporting workers who are rendered jobless or lose their livelihoods as a result of decisions to move to more environmentally friendly methods of production, by providing both unemployment benefits and opportunities for retraining. Making jobs greener also should mean making them more decent. This is of particular relevance to people in precarious, informal or atypical working relations, who may otherwise bear the highest costs of a climate-related transitions (ILO 2015).   3. The Importance of a systemic approach to social protection   The extent to which social protection programmes can contribute to strengthening climate resilience depends to a large degree on programme design and the operational capacity of public institutions and bureaucracies to deliver services and transfers in a predictable and regular manner. Integrated management information systems, an up to date and comprehensive beneficiary registry, and effective and efficient payment and distribution mechanisms are all key ingredients for the establishment of sustainable and flexible social protection measures.   Establishing systemic and rights-based approaches to social protection remains the most critical aspect of durable and effective social protection schemes. The establishment of a social protection system that comprises integrated programmes that deliver the social protection guarantees to cover life course risks is an important precondition for the integration of climate-related measures. At the same time, it is worth remembering that those social protection programmes already in place, which may not have been specifically designed to address climate risks, already significantly help to increase resilience and coping mechanisms for people struggling with climate change.   These beneficial effects will be even stronger if social protection systems are strengthened to be climate sensitive and if coverage is expanded to deal with newer risks and affected geographical areas (IPCC 2022).   Working towards a systemic and climate resilient approach to social protection system strengthening will mean working collaboratively with a range of actors, including state institutions at local, regional, and national level, social partners, civil society actors and development partners. In a climate related context, this requires special attention to cross-sectoral budgeting, planning, designing, and implementation.   4. The human right to social protection in the face of loss and damage   Social protection is a human right and can be an important mechanism to advance international climate justice and to facilitate a rights-based approach to loss and damage (Kaltenborn 2023). However, there is also a need to address climate change injustice, derived from an unfair global architecture, which exacerbates the negative impacts of climate change on certain groups.   Building social protection systems that can respond to the ever more frequent climate-related shocks and crises will not by itself resolve all underlying problems, but it can at least strengthen access of those most at risk to their social and economic rights and reduce dependency on a financially and institutionally overstretched humanitarian aid sector, particularly in protracted crises situations.   5. The importance of increased financing for social protection   Social protection schemes across the world face a serious financing gap. This gap is disproportionally large in those countries, which are experiencing the most negative social and economic consequences of climate-change.   While high and middle income countries across the world spend on average 12.9 per cent of their GDP on social protection (excluding health), lower-middle income countries spend around 2.5 per cent and low-income countries a mere 1.1 per cent (ILO 2021).   While all countries, and in particular low-income countries, need to increase their domestic financial resources allocated to social protection, international financing sources, including bilateral and multilateral funding mechanisms, will remain important in the short and medium term. Such financing can also derive from the Loss and Damage Fund.   Apart from financing the reconstruction of infrastructure and humanitarian assistance in relation to climate-related losses and damages, support can also go to strengthening social protection systems to react to climate-induced risks and impacts.   This can be considered part of a comprehensive and integrated approach to ensuring that actions to address climate-related losses and damages, including financing such actions, are consistent with a country’s overarching development goals and objectives, including their national actions to achieve the SDGs, to realise human rights for all and to ensure the right to development for all.   6. Call for Action: strengthening Social Protection Systems for Climate Justice   Recognize the Role of Social Protection in Addressing Climate Change   Build universal social protection systems: support countries’ efforts to invest in integrated social protection systems for all throughout the life course rather than setting up isolated programmes to respond to for climate risks. This is the best strategy to reduce vulnerability of the most affected people and countries and to address the social and economic consequences of climate-related loss and damage in the future.   Establish and improve rights-based social protection schemes: states have a right to the resources needed to respond to loss and damage, caused by climate change, for which they bear minimal responsibility.   Individuals affected should also have a right to support. For example, in the event of climate-related illness (due to heat, changes in disease profiles etc.), crop loss or the death of a family member, individuals should have the right to access health services and to receive financial support to sustain their livelihoods.   This is where a predictable social security system makes an important difference to programmes of humanitarian aid; such programmes may not be rights based, not enforceable by law and may have limited durability.   Link Social Protection and Climate Action:   Include social protection in climate action: governments should explicitly include social protection measures and the expansion of social protection systems in their national climate strategies.   Integrate climate action in social protection policies: stronger coordination between crisis prevention, social protection and humanitarian aid is necessary to maximise the effectiveness of existing mechanisms and to avoid creating costly parallel structures and institutions.   Ensure social protection systems can be more responsive to sudden onset risks and link social protection to measures that incentivize people to protect the eco-system.   Invest in and highlight Social Outcomes for Climate-Related Financial Mechanisms:   Reduce poverty and inequality: in addition to the negative impacts of climate change on coastlines, agricultural lands or highways, equal consideration should be given to the effect on social cohesion, specifically on poverty, vulnerability and equity in the assessment of loss and damage experienced by different sectors of the population. This is all the more important as the impact of climate change is already exacerbating existing inequalities.   Increase predictable financing for social protection: in order to build social protection systems that can provide support in a predictable and reliable manner, finance institutions should explicitly include opportunities to finance social protection in their risk mitigation and risk management portfolios.   This includes the Loss and Damage Fund and other existing climate-related finance mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund. There are other potential additional options to consider such as the allocation of special drawing rights (SDRs) and the introduction of financial transactions tax, etc. in international finance.   http://www.socialprotectionfloorscoalition.org/2024/05/policy-brief-social-protection-for-climate-justice-why-and-how/ http://www.developmentpathways.co.uk/blog/social-protection-is-a-prerequisite-for-climate-justice/   * 29 July 2026   Protect Workers from Extreme Heat. (AFL-CIO American Unions)   Cities coast to coast are breaking all-time heat records this July, as the extreme heat continues. But while workers continue to face dangerous and potentially deadly working conditions, anti-worker leaders in Congress are quietly attempting to stop any heat safety protection laws from being passed, now or in the future.   H.R. 6213, the misnamed Heat Workforce Standards Act, would prohibit the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from creating or enforcing any national heat safety law. This cannot stand.   Working in extreme heat, both inside and outside, makes workers vulnerable to heat-related illness and even death. It’s difficult to track as heat-related deaths and illnesses are not always recorded as such. As a result, this is a serious problem that is undercounted. In 2024, OSHA proposed the nation’s first heat safety standard. The Trump administration has yet to implement these much-needed protections.   Many heat safety measures are common sense, widely accepted and necessary to save lives. Workers are facing increasingly hot temperatures across the country, year after year. And all workers are at serious risk of harm from the heat.   http://aflcio.org/2026/7/29/take-action-heat-safety-work http://www.eenews.net/articles/panel-advances-bill-to-kill-worker-heat-protections/ http://insideclimatenews.org/news/24072026/osha-worker-heat-protections-still-not-final/ http://www.americanprogress.org/article/extreme-heat-is-more-dangerous-for-workers-every-year/ Visit the related web page
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