The UN's Loss-and-Damage Fund Is Already Broke

Grant$174 billion.

MilesThat's global aid total for all of 2025.

GrantDown from $215 billion the year before. Gone.

MilesThe OECD put out the number, and their own chair called it deeply concerning.

GrantCarsten Staur said that, and he runs the DAC. He's not prone to drama.

Miles23% in real terms in a single year. That's the steepest drop in the history of foreign aid.

GrantNot since anyone started counting.

MilesAnd the core bilateral programs, the money that actually funds clinics and schools on the ground, that piece fell over 26%, worst on record for that number specifically.

GrantSo picture a country that was getting $4 for every $5 it used to, getting $3.

MilesLess than that in some cases.

GrantI'm Grant.

MilesI'm Miles, and this is the week the money question stopped being background noise at the UN and became the whole story.

GrantBecause General Assembly week just started in New York, and every camera in the building is pointed at the podium speeches.

MilesWe are not doing that today.

GrantWe're doing the side rooms, the finance fights nobody's covering.

MilesDebt relief, tax rules, and a climate fund that may not add up the way anyone's been told.

GrantWhile the aid pie just shrank by almost a quarter.

MilesWhich changes who's fighting for what's left.

GrantAnd who's even in the room this year is different too.

MilesVery different. Let's get into who's actually running the show.

GrantHigh-Level week runs September 22nd through the 29th in New York, so we're a couple weeks out.

MilesAnd this year, the gavel's in an unusual hand. Bangladesh's Khalilur Rahman is presiding.

GrantFirst Asia-Pacific president of the Assembly in years, according to the brief we pulled together.

MilesWhich matters more than it sounds. The rotation usually keeps that seat in a small rotating circle.

GrantRight. And Rahman's not a career diplomat from a G7 capital. He's coming out of Dhaka.

MilesState's own framing calls this a back to basics session: sovereignty, results, and peace and security.

GrantBut the actual agenda they're pointing to is climate, sea level rise, and pandemic preparedness.

MilesTrust and transformation. That's the official language for the 81st session.

GrantSea level rise on the same agenda as pandemic preparedness. That's two entirely different expertise sets for one delegation to cover.

MilesExactly the point. A foreign ministry built for classic diplomacy is suddenly supposed to field specialists in three or four disconnected fields at once.

GrantNice words. Doesn't tell you who's actually setting the terms in the room.

MilesThat's the part that worries me. You stack climate, debt, and tax policy onto one week.

GrantAnd you get a polycrisis agenda where everything's urgent and nothing gets sequenced.

MilesWhich sounds neutral until you ask who has the staff to work five tracks at once.

GrantA small island delegation sends maybe three people to cover parallel negotiating rooms.

MilesThe US delegation alone dwarfs that. So does the EU's.

GrantSo one delegate is trying to sit in the debt session, the tax session, and the climate session in the same afternoon.

MilesPhysically impossible. Something has to give, and it's never the big delegation priorities that give.

GrantSo the agenda gets crowded, and the states with the fewest resources get crowded out first.

MilesEven with an Asia-Pacific president holding the gavel.

GrantRahman can set tone. He can't reassign staff to Maputo or Manila.

MilesSo you've got a symbolic shift at the top and a structural squeeze underneath it.

GrantSymbolism doesn't pay a delegation's hotel bill or staff at side meetings.

MilesWhich is exactly why the fights that matter this year aren't happening on the dais.

GrantThey're happening over financing, who's actually paying and who is actually owed.

MilesAnd that pulls us straight back to money, doesn't it?

GrantIt does. Because knowing who's in the room only gets you halfway.

MilesThe real question is whether there's anything left in the accounts once they sit down.

GrantNow, we opened on the size of the drop. Let's talk about what it means in relative terms, because the sheer number is almost worse.

MilesDAC governments are now giving out just about a quarter of 1% of their combined national income. That's the whole global aid pot for a year.

GrantA quarter of a percent. Picture a household clearing $80,000 a year and giving away $200 to charity. That's roughly the donor math right now.

MilesAnd it's not an even squeeze across every line item. Bilateral core programming, direct government to government funding, the stuff that pays ministries and clinics, took the worst hit of any category.

GrantWorse than humanitarian?

MilesWorse than humanitarian. Worse than multilateral pledges. Donors protected the visible emergency spending and let the quiet, flexible country funding absorb the cut.

GrantSo the governments with the least capacity to backfill lost the money that gave them the most room to maneuver.

MilesRight. Those are the same delegations walking into loss and damage negotiations this week from Manila to Maputo, asking for predictable financing instead of one more emergency pledge.

GrantWhat does predictable financing actually look like, though? Walk me through it.

MilesIt's a health ministry knowing in January what it'll have in December instead of waiting on a supplemental pledge announcement to find out if the clinic budget survives the year.

GrantOECD's own DAC chair, Carsten Staur, put it plainly. He called this trend line deeply concerning.

MilesThat's about as blunt as an OECD chair gets in public.

GrantI'd push it further than he did. When your biggest funders are pulling back on the money with no strings attached, you're not managing a shortfall anymore. You're managing a retreat.

MilesMaybe. Or donors are just recalibrating towards fewer, bigger commitments instead of walking away entirely. We don't know yet.

GrantOr it's both at once. A retreat dressed up as recalibration, and the difference only shows up when the numbers don't recover next year.

MilesThat's the test. If next year's number bounces back, call it a blip. If it doesn't, call it what it is.

GrantEither way, this is the floor everything else at UNGA gets built on this year. Loss and damage, the tax convention push, debt relief, none of it exists apart from donor budgets shrinking this fast.

MilesWith traditional aid drying up like that, the argument over who pays instead has moved into a UN conference room most networks back home have never set foot in.

GrantAnd that's exactly where we're headed next.

MilesWhile everyone's camped outside the General Debate podium, there's a UN tax convention grinding through its Fifth round of negotiating sessions.

GrantFifth round already. Where's that actually landed? Tax Justice Network's August analysis says the talks have passed the midpoint toward a text they want ready for the General Assembly in 2027.

MilesTwenty-seven. So this isn't a this year problem.

GrantNo, but the midpoint's exactly where the real fight starts.

MilesWhat fight?

GrantTax Justice Network lays it out pretty bluntly. A lot of OECD countries are pushing to water down the obligations in the draft.

MilesWhile who's pushing back?

GrantThe G77 and the African Group pushing the opposite way for something with actual teeth.

MilesWhat's actual teeth mean here? Enforcement mechanisms, reporting requirements, the pieces that would make evasion by multinationals harder to paper over.

GrantThat's exactly what the diluting camp wants softened.

MilesSo the countries that wrote the current international tax rules want to keep writing them.

GrantThat's the shape of it.

MilesWait, that's not a stalemate. That's the whole convention's premise under threat.

GrantRight. And it's not abstract for the delegations pushing it. This is how they see clawing back revenue they're losing twice over.

MilesTwice over how?

GrantOnce through the aid cuts we already covered, once through profit shifting and illicit flows nobody's collecting tax on.

MilesThat's my read of the room too. A convention becomes leverage when the aid checks stop showing up.

GrantExactly why Manilas delegation and Nairobis aren't treating this as some footnote item.

MilesMeanwhile, that OECD side loses money on the current setup. Doesn't add up unless they think the loopholes are worth more than the goodwill.

GrantThat's the calculation delegations think is happening, whether anyone in Brussels or Washington says it out loud.

MilesDoes the OECD side even need to negotiate in good faith if they're the ones with the most to lose from a stronger rule book?

GrantThat's the tension nobody's resolved before 2027, and it's happening in a conference room, not a plenary speech.

MilesFine. So that's the fight over money nobody's collected yet.

GrantNow flip it around. What happens to money that's already supposed to be paid out? The loss and damage fund.

MilesThe one built specifically so vulnerable countries don't have to wait for a 2027 tax treaty to get paid.

GrantExcept every recent report on that fund tells a different story about how much is actually in it.

MilesWhich is exactly where we're headed next.

GrantSo let's talk about the fund that's actually supposed to write the checks.

MilesThe Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. It's been operational a little over a year now.

GrantA report that just came out this week says it's holding about eight hundred and twenty million dollars pledged, not all of it delivered, with only three hundred and fifty million actually allocated, and campaigners warn it could run dry next year.

MilesNot delivered, meaning what exactly?

GrantMeaning pledges on paper that haven't landed in the account yet.

MilesSo the real number's smaller than eight twenty.

GrantCould be a lot smaller.

MilesAnd three fifty of it's already spoken for.

GrantWhich means a fund meant to cover the whole developing world's climate damage is already living close to the edge. Speaking of edges, Nepal. The same report puts Nepal's flood damage at roughly two and a half billion dollars, and that's driving calls for an emergency board meeting.

MilesTwo point five six billion for one country's floods.

GrantOne country against a fund that's already spent three fifty total.

MilesThis is the second emergency board request in half a year.

GrantAnd the fund's structure wasn't built to move that fast.

MilesAnd that's before the bigger ask. Coverage of the July board meeting in Manila put funding requests on the table at two point eight billion dollars.

GrantAgainst how much available?

MilesTwo hundred and fifty million. Campaigners at that meeting said the real number should be fifty billion a year every year from 2027 through 2031.

GrantFifty billion a year against two hundred and fifty million in the room right now. That's not a gap. That's a different planet.

MilesIt gets worse zoomed out further. An investigative piece back in November had the fund holding four hundred and thirty-one million against at least seven hundred and twenty-four billion in estimated annual need.

GrantSeven hundred and twenty-four billion.

MilesThe same piece noted loss and damage barely came up politically at COP30 in Belém.

GrantSo pick a number. Eight twenty, four thirty-one, two fifty, three fifty allocated. None of these figures agree with each other.

MilesThey're measuring different things, pledged versus available versus allocated, but even accounting for that, it doesn't add up clean.

GrantAnd nobody in that Manila room can tell you which number's the true one.

MilesThat's the trust deficit in one sentence, a pile of figures nobody's forced to square.

GrantA fund that can't tell you what it actually holds is a fund nobody trusts to tell you what it'll pay out.

MilesAnd it's not like these countries have anything in reserve to fall back on.

GrantNo. The same governments waiting on this fund are already servicing debt loads that eat their budgets alive.

MilesSo the shortfall isn't happening in a vacuum. It's landing on the same countries already drowning in debt payments, the ones with the least room to absorb a disaster like Nepal's on their own. There's a story under all this that almost nobody in the Western press is touching: debt.

GrantDebt architecture reform, IMF conditionality. It's on the UNGA81 agenda and is barely getting a paragraph anywhere.

MilesWhy does that surprise you? It's not a photogenic fight. No ribbon-cutting, no leader walking into the chamber.

GrantIt's the whole game underneath the game, though. You've got finance ministers from the Global South raising it in every side room they can find.

MilesGive me the mechanism. Why does debt architecture connect to anything we've talked about today?

GrantThink about it from a treasury desk. A country's already servicing loans denominated in dollars. Rates went up, currency went down against the dollar. Every payment got more expensive without the debt itself changing.

MilesRight. That's just math nobody controls from the borrower side.

GrantAnd IMF conditionality means new lending, the kind that could plug a budget hole, comes with strings: spending caps, subsidy cuts, timelines. They don't care what your finance ministry actually needs this quarter.

MilesSo you can't just borrow your way out of the gap either.

GrantExactly. Now put a flood-damaged province in that same country waiting on a payout from the fund we've just spent 10 minutes proving can't reconcile its own books.

MilesNepal's the case we already walked through.

GrantRight. I'm not rerunning those numbers. I'm saying that ministry is fighting a debt payment and a disaster recovery bill in the same fiscal year out of the same shrinking revenue.

MilesAnd the fund they're owed money from is the one we just spent 10 minutes proving can't reconcile its own books.

GrantSo the fiscal room gets squeezed from both directions at once. Debt service on one side, a payout that may or may not show up on the other.

MilesThat's not two separate crises. That's one balance sheet.

GrantIt's the same finance ministry, the same quarter, the same dollar shortfall showing up twice.

MilesWhich is why delegations keep raising debt architecture in rooms CNN's cameras never enter.

GrantBecause for them, it's not abstract. It's whether the school rebuild happens this year or three years from now.

MilesSo walk it all the way through. Aid collapsed. The tax convention stalled on midpoint. The loss and damage numbers don't add up across three reports. And now debt service is eating the same countries from underneath.

GrantPut those four pieces on one table, and you're not looking at rhetoric anymore. You're looking at a math problem nobody in that building has solved.

MilesWhich tells you exactly where this session actually sits and what's worth watching once the speeches stop.

GrantSo where does that leave the room right now, Miles?

MilesRahman's presiding over a session that keeps saying trust and delivering shortfalls.

GrantThe aid numbers, the tax fight, the fund. Three separate stories, same conclusion.

MilesNone of them add up to the language on the program.

GrantOn the tax convention, the push is still toward that same 2027 target everyone's negotiating around.

MilesRight. And that deadline doesn't move just because the obligations keep getting watered down in the drafting.

GrantSo the calendar says progress. The text says stalemate.

MilesThat's the gap I'd watch heading into next year's sessions.

GrantAnd it's not like delegations get a do-over if the 2027 text comes out watered down. That's the rule book for a generation of tax disputes.

MilesWhich is exactly why the G77 negotiators are treating every drafting session between now and then as make or break, not just paperwork.

GrantMeanwhile, Nepal's still sitting there waiting on a check.

MilesClimate Change News reported campaigners are now pushing the fund's board to call an emergency meeting specifically over that damage.

GrantAn emergency meeting nobody's confirmed is happening.

MilesCorrect. And if the board doesn't move fast, you've got a live case study of the fund failing in real time, not in a report.

GrantAnd it's the kind of failure that plays out in a village, not a spreadsheet. People waiting on reconstruction money while the board schedules another call.

MilesThat's the distance between a UN press release and what it actually feels like in Kathmandu right now.

GrantThat's the one to track. Not the pledge conference, not the press release. Whether an actual meeting gets called.

MilesWestern outlets aren't touching it yet. It's a Kathmandu story before it's a New York story.

GrantWhich is sort of the whole session in miniature.

MilesA president from the region nobody expected, a fund that can't reconcile its own numbers, and a tax deal that's still a year of drafting away from meaning anything.

GrantAnd every one of those threads points the same direction: good intentions on the program, hard limits in the account.

MilesWhich is the story underneath all of UNGA week, whether or not the cameras catch it.

GrantPut a bow on it. Everyone showed up to the same building this week with different math.

MilesAnd the countries with the least staff in the room are the ones footing the bill for that gap.

GrantThat's the state of play heading into high level week. Time to close it out. Three things to sit with from this session. Aid is collapsing. The tax convention is stuck in committee, and the loss and damage fund can't even tell you what it holds.

MilesRahman's presidency was supposed to be the story. It's barely a footnote next to those three.

GrantIf you're a finance minister in Kathmandu or Maputo this week, none of that is abstract.

MilesIt's the actual budget you're working with.

GrantIf this show is useful to you, share it with someone who reads the General Assembly debate speeches and skips the finance committee rooms.

MilesAnd subscribe so you get the follow-up when the fund numbers get audited, if they get audited.

GrantRate it, too. It actually helps people find us.

MilesOne date to circle past this week: the tax convention text is due to the General Assembly in 2027.

GrantThat's not far off given how slow this round has moved.

MilesWatch whether the diluted language survives the drafting or whether the G77 holds the line.

GrantWe'll be back with what High-Level Week actually produced once the speeches are over and the numbers are in.