In 2022, the latest year for which full data are available, the world spent just short of US$10 trillion on health care. The United States was by far the largest single spender, representing 43% of the total. At the other end, around 75 of the poorest countries spent less than 4% of the global total, and many are not allowed to increase this. That’s because they owe huge sums to richer countries — and the lending agreements say that paying off debts has to be prioritized ahead of public spending.

This is just one example of how inequity is baked into the world’s financial system — creditors can dictate lending terms to some of the most vulnerable countries without any oversight. However, in June and July 2025, the international community will have an opportunity to ensure that this situation can be consigned to history.

“The finding is devastating but utterly unsurprising: Climate change did play a role, and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often uncounted numbers of people,” Friederike Otto, the lead of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College climate scientist, said during a media briefing on the scientists' findings. “As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse.”

“Heat waves are by far the deadliest extreme event, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer.”

Trade deals can allow international corporations to trample over the rights of governments in the Global South. That is the message from the Colombian government, which describes the effect of such deals as a “bloodbath” for their national sovereignty. And now, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has said he wants to renegotiate the deals his country has with the United States, European Union and the United Kingdom.

He has a strong case because, in the last couple of years, the US and European countries have also been renegotiating similar trade and investment deals, as they try to prevent themselves from being sued in the secretive “corporate courts” that these deals create.

Only this year, the British government withdrew from a toxic investment deal, called the Energy Charter Treaty, after a slew of cases in which European governments were sued by fossil fuel corporations for taking climate action which supposedly damaged the profits of said businesses.

So the question now is whether European countries are going to accept that southern countries need the same policy space to deal with climate change and numerous other problems they face. Or whether they will demand these countries continue to abide by these awful, one-sided deals.

A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various U.N. targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective.

“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date.

The new report was the result of three years of work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, an expert body that’s analogous to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which periodically assesses the state of the science on global warming.