For us to tackle climate change, companies need to pay their tax

It’s been a year of natural disasters. After Irma, Maria, Harvey, hurricane Florence left a devastating landscape in the Caribbean. Extreme temperatures across the northern hemisphere have caused devastating fires from Europe to the US. Dozens have been killed in the Philippines after typhoon Mangkhut triggered landslides.

‘The IMF reports that the revenue lost from tax
evasion in developing countries is 1.3 times larger,
 as a share of GDP, than it is in advanced economies.’

And the worst consequences of climate change are yet to come.

It is a huge challenge for rich countries and for developing nations, a sisyphean task: how to collect enough revenue to respond to major catastrophes, while at the same time trying to lift billions of people out of poverty?

Look at Indonesia. Disasters are a familiar tragedy in the world’s fourth most populous nation, with its thousands of islands across hundreds of miles of ocean. This should make disaster risk planning crucial. It is not the case, as the latest earthquake and tsunami showed. Reports revealed that parts of the tsunami alert system didn’t work. In some areas, there were no sirens at all. The death toll is still climbing.

Read the opinion piece by Wayne Swan from The Guardian - “For us to tackle climate change, companies need to pay their tax.”