The Myth of Scarcity: Financing Life or Sustaining the Privileges of Climate Debtors

This report analyzes the structural causes of the climate finance gap in Latin America and challenges the idea that it is the result of a genuine lack of resources. The study shows how current fiscal and financial rules, indebtedness, regressive tax systems, and subsidies for polluting activities constrain the fiscal space of countries in the Global South to address the climate crisis. Against this backdrop, the report puts forward alternatives to mobilize resources without deepening indebtedness, including greater taxation of extreme wealth and fossil fuel revenues, reducing tax evasion and avoidance, eliminating regressive tax privileges, and building a new international financial architecture that is more democratic, transparent, and oriented toward climate justice. The proposal seeks to transform the rules that currently reproduce inequalities and dependency, paving the way for financing that prioritizes life, redistribution, and a just transition.