In this Essay, I argue that the climate crisis has provided the global finance industry an opportunity to make exorbitant profits from majority Black and Brown countries in the Global South. I show how the global finance industry is leveraging its muscle over climate-vulnerable and heavily indebted countries in the Global South through complex financial transactions. These transactions commodify nature and the biodiversity resources of these Global South countries. In return, these Global South countries borrow capital to address the climate crisis and to pay off their debts. This borrowing that invariably comes at high interest rates, especially through bond instruments, gives the global finance industry power to price biodiversity resources such as forests as investible assets. These instruments include climate bonds; green, blue and sustainability linked bonds; and debt-for-nature swaps. Further, through transactions such as carbon credits, the global finance industry in conjunction with Global South governments have created a new terra nullius narrative under which the ‘abundant’ and ‘valuable ecosystems’ of the Global South are being paraded as open for foreign investors without any barriers. I claim that these profit-making and extractive initiatives are threatening to displace the historical ecological responsibility of the Global North countries most responsible for the climate crisis. As a result, the peoples of the countries least responsible for the climate crisis are bearing not only the brunt of the climate crisis but the increasing and unsustainable levels of sovereign debt as well. The ever-rising sovereign debt servicing costs now constitutes a very large percentages of the revenues of these governments. In addition, these loans offload the costs and risks of the business model of the global finance industry to indebted and climate vulnerable governments and particularly to their citizens who are almost always invariably Black or Brown.
