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Global leaders demand new UN tax rules to fight climate crisis – EnviroNews
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As negotiators prepare to descend upon the United Nations for a high-stakes showdown over the future of global finance, a coalition of international experts and civil society leaders is issuing a stark warning: The planet cannot afford the status quo of a “broken” tax system that allows hundreds of billions of dollars to vanish while the world burns.
The upcoming session of the UN Tax Convention, scheduled for Aug. 3–13, 2026, is being framed not merely as a technical meeting but as a “defining” moment for both economic sovereignty and climate survival.
During an online media briefing on Thursday, July 30, 2026, experts argued that the convention represents a “game changer” that could finally force the world’s wealthiest polluters to pay for the environmental devastation they have wrought.
The Climate-Tax Nexus: A Game Changer
For Jeannie Manipon, Senior Programme Manager for Development Finance at the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, the link between tax justice and climate justice is undeniable.
Speaking from Manila, where super typhoons have become the “new normal,” Manipon described the daily struggle of millions in Asia who bear the brunt of a crisis they did not create.
“Every time we ask governments to deliver on climate finance, we are told there’s no money,” Manipon said.
“We cannot accept that argument, especially when we know… every year the world loses nearly $500 billion to global tax abuse by corporations and the super-rich.”
Manipon argued that the UN Tax Convention must serve as a mechanism to curb this abuse and dismantle an international tax architecture that has historically disadvantaged the Global South.
She proposed a radical shift: embedding the “polluter pays” principle directly into the convention’s framework to tax the global profits of the fossil fuel industry.
The potential revenue is staggering. According to Manipon, a 20% surtax on the global profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies between 2022 and 2024 would have generated billions of dollars.
Had such a mechanism existed since the 2015 Paris Agreement, more than $1 trillion could have been mobilized for climate finance.
“Think about what that could have meant for the people living in the front lines of climate impacts,” Manipon said. “We cannot reverse the climate crisis, but we can turn many things around.”
The ‘Inadequate’ Draft and the Price of Inaction
Despite the high stakes, there is growing concern that the current negotiating texts are falling short of the moment.
Rebecca Newsom, Global Political Lead at Greenpeace International, warned that the draft text published last week fails to seize the opportunity to hold the wealthiest polluters accountable.
“The polluter pays principle currently appears nowhere in the draft,” Newsom said.
She noted that the article on taxing high-net-worth individuals has actually been “weakened” since earlier versions of the text in January.
Newsom characterised this “inadequate” text as being “totally at odds” with the escalating physical and economic realities of the climate crisis.
She pointed to late June heatwaves that killed more than 10,000 people across Europe and wildfires in July that displaced hundreds of thousands.
Simultaneously, the fossil fuel industry continues to report “obscene” profits.
Newsom cited Shell’s second-quarter results for 2026, which showed almost $10 billion in profits—a figure driven in part by global conflict.
To illustrate the scale, Newsom noted that this single quarter of profit could have funded enough onshore wind in the United Kingdom to power 5.8 million homes.
“Someone earning over $13,000 every single day since the birth of Jesus would still not have earned as much money as Shell made in profit over the last three months alone,” Newsom added.
Greenpeace research further highlights the disparity: the world’s richest 0.01% were linked to an estimated $992 billion in climate debt in 2022 alone through their investments in highly polluting industries like oil and gas.
Cracking the ‘Black Box’ of Corporate Tax Avoidance
Central to the negotiations is the fight against “transfer pricing,” a practice Vincent Kiezebrink, a researcher at SOMO, described as the “last black box of tax avoidance”.
Kiezebrink, co-author of the newly released report “The Shell Files,” presented evidence of how multinational corporations use accounting maneuvers to shift profits away from where value is actually created.
Drawing on a leak of 200,000 confidential documents, Kiezebrink detailed how Shell allegedly utilized its Bahamian oil trading office to avoid taxes.
The report found that Shell’s Bahamian traders were “hugely more profitable” than average employees, profiting from transactions with Shell subsidiaries in Brazil, Nigeria, and the UK. Kiezebrink estimated these tax losses to be in the billions.
Furthermore, Shell’s service operations in the Netherlands and the UK—employing thousands—reportedly made zero profits for decades by charging services “at cost”.
Academic analysis suggests this setup may be illegal, with estimated tax losses of $1.1 billion for the Netherlands and $340 million for the UK.
The root of the problem, according to Kiezebrink, is the “arms length principle,” which naively expects subsidiaries of the same company to trade with each other as if they were unrelated entities.
“This naively expects corporations like Shell to disregard their singular financial interests,” Kiezebrink said.
He joined other advocates in calling for the UN to move toward “unitary taxation” and “formulary apportionment” to stop corporations from using these “accounting tricks” to move billions out of Africa and other regions tax-free.
The Missing Roadmap: A Global Asset Registry
For Latin America and the Caribbean, the crisis is one of both climate and extreme inequality. Klelia Guerrero García, a tax justice specialist at LATINDADD, argued that the two cannot be separated.
“The richest people in the world have both the most responsibility and the most capacity to contribute,” García said.
“However, many countries, particularly Global South, are still facing huge difficulties to mobilize public resources necessary to finance adaptation, mitigation, losses and damages.”
García identified a “fundamental hurdle” in the current system: it is impossible to tax wealth if you cannot see it.
She noted that tax administrations often cannot identify the “final beneficiary” or owner of offshore companies and trusts, allowing huge fortunes to escape taxation.
The solution, García argued, is the incorporation of a “Global Asset Registry” into the UN convention.
While the current draft mentions taxing high-net-worth individuals, she cautioned that it lacks the “roadmap” to achieve it.
“Without transparency, we cannot have an effective taxing to wealth,” García said.
“If governments actually want to fight inequality and finance climate action, this initiative of the global asset registry cannot be out of the convention”.
Geopolitical Tensions and the ‘US Last’ Approach
The negotiations are set against a backdrop of deep geopolitical friction. Tove Maria Ryding, Tax Coordinator for Tax Justice Europe, warned that the current draft protocols seem “completely disconnected” from the convention’s core principles.
Ryding expressed concern that the UN might inadvertently implement the “unfair tax rules of the past” rather than forging a new path based on fairness and transparency.
She criticised the OECD-led system as a “messy” network of treaties that has failed for a century.
Previous discussions in the briefing highlighted a shift in power dynamics, with advocates noting a “US Last” approach at the UN compared to the “US First” approach of the OECD.
Ryding suggested that Northern countries have returned to the table primarily due to a “fear of missing out” as developing nations push for a system that finally prioritizes their own taxing rights.
As the Aug. 3 start date looms, the message from the Global South is one of resolve. Advocates maintain that the convention is the only way to end the “chaotic” system where every country fights for itself.
“The UN tax convention, we believe, if done right, could be one of the best news in the global fight for tax and climate justice,” Manipon said.
“What kind of UN tax convention do we want? One that turns a blind eye to one of the defining challenges of our times or one that seizes the opportunity to be a game changer?”
By Winston Mwale, AfricaBrief