Ahead of the 5th negotiating session of the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation in New York, the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD) is calling on Asian governments to take a decisive stand for a transformative treaty that forces fossil fuel polluters to fund global climate action.
Asian civil society leaders warn that while super typhoons and extreme weather continue to devastate frontline communities across Asia, wealthy Global North nations routinely claim they lack the public funds to honor their climate finance commitments. APMDD forcefully rejects this argument, pointing to research from the State of Tax Justice report, which reveals that nearly $500 billion is drained from public coffers every year due to global tax abuse by multinational corporations and the super-rich.
“For decades, Big Oil has enjoyed a free ride in the Global South, extracting immense wealth, shifting profits offshore, and leaving our communities to foot the bill for climate catastrophe,” said Lidy Nacpil, Coordinator of APMDD. “Wealthy nations cannot claim there is no money for climate finance while an obsolete, biased tax system allows fossil fuel giants to siphon billions out of developing countries. The UN Tax Convention must end this corporate immunity. Asian delegates must demand a binding treaty that reclaims our sovereign taxing rights, taxes fossil fuel super-profits where they are made, and channels those funds directly into climate survival.”
APMDD and its regional allies are demanding that negotiators explicitly embed the polluters-pay principle into the UN Tax Convention through a global mechanism designed to tax the profits of the fossil fuel industry.
“This proposed policy serves two vital purposes: raising massive public revenues dedicated to climate finance for frontline communities, and using targeted taxation to disincentivize the aggressive expansion of the fossil fuel sector, including the disruptive search across Asia for transition minerals and alternative fossil energy, thereby advancing the vision of a fossil-free future,” said Jeannie Manipon, head of APMDD’s Development Finance team.
The urgent need for windfall profit taxation is further highlighted by the ongoing surge in fossil fuel corporate earnings. Energy giant Shell more than doubled its quarterly net profit to $9.84 billion in the second quarter of 2026, significantly beating market expectations as commodity price spikes and market volatility boosted global oil and gas revenues.
This stark contrast between record oil profits and underfunded climate resilience is supported by broader research from Eurodad and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice in their study, Make Polluters Pay: Proposal for a surtax on fossil fuel industries’ profits. The analysis demonstrates that applying a 20 percent surtax on the global windfall profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies would have yielded US$ 236 billion in 2022, US$ 184 billion in 2023, and US$ 147 billion in 2024. Had such a polluter surtax been instituted continuously since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, more than US$ 1 trillion could have been mobilized and deployed directly to communities enduring the frontlines of climate disruption.
Surtaxes are primarily deployed to target windfall or super-profits when companies experience exceptionally high earnings due to external crises—such as oil and gas firms during energy price spikes—while simultaneously serving as a dedicated funding mechanism for specific public needs like climate finance, disaster recovery, or healthcare, and acting as a policy tool under the Polluters Pay Principle to disincentivize activities that inflict heavy environmental or social costs.
Manipon emphasized that had such a polluter surtax been instituted continuously since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, more than US$ 1 trillion could have been mobilized and deployed directly to communities enduring the frontlines of climate disruption.
APMDD joined other Asian civil society leaders from the umbrella alliance Tax and Fiscal Justice-Asia (TAFJA) in calling on governments from Asia to ensure that the future UN Tax Convention will ensure the effective taxation of the fossil fuel industry and hold high-emitting industries accountable for ecological damage.
Contact:
In New York – Lani C. Villanueva
Email villanueva.lani@gmail.com
Mobile/WhatsApp 639052472970