The triple COVID-19, economic, and climate crisis poses a growing challenge to debt sustainability and financing for climate action. There are growing calls to look for solutions for the three crisis together, notably through “debt-for-climate” swaps.

Around 1 in 8 countries globally spends more on debt than on social services, according to a UNICEF report.

The African Economic Outlook is the African Development Bank’s flagship annual publication. It provides economic data as well as analysis and recommendations for the continent’s economies. Each edition focuses on a contemporary theme.

This study provides an analysis of the linkages between multi-hazard exposure, lack of resilience, resulting disaster risk with related loss and damage, sovereign debt risks, and the lack of investment into resilience building. The COVID-19 pandemic has come on top of the climate crisis, the existential threat of our time.

South Africa’s economy, which was already in a precarious state before Covid-2019, has been tipped into full blown crisis by the pandemic. Gross na-tional government debt is expected to be upwards of 86% within two years.

Low-income countries (LICs) are suffering from triple distresses: the mortal impact of Covid-19, increasing debt burdens, and climate change impacts. Obviously, they are all suffering from a liquidity crunch because of competing national priorities.

The Debt-for-Climate Initiative (DCI) is an effort to provide comprehensive debt relief for eligible countries to generate fiscal space for climate action. The DCI aims at achieving maximum creditor and debtor participation. The DCI consists of three pillars.

Even before COVID-19, fears were growing over developing country debt, which had surpassed US$8 trillion by the end of 2019. The pandemic has made the situation much worse as its economic impact pushes millions more women, children and men in these countries into poverty.

The deaths due to accidents have been classified into two broad groups - accidental deaths due to causes attributable to nature and accidental deaths due to causes not attributable to nature.