Debt for Climate at the People Power Conference Copenhagen 2025

From left to right: Melani Gunathilaka from Debt For Climate (Sri Lanka) , Lubna Alkanawati from Women Now for Development (Syria), and Dylan Matthews from Peace Direct (UK)

From April 8–10, 2025, ActionAid Denmark hosted the 2nd Copenhagen People Power Conference, focusing on peace and peace-building by exploring how to best support social movements that drive change for just peace from below. The conference emphasized the role of social movements in conflict transformation, resistance, and their contributions to shaping lasting peace. Participants included social movement leaders, government changemakers, committed donors, UN representatives, academics, and activists from around the world. Representatives for Debt for Climate were Melani Gunathilaka (Sri Lanka) and Jana Westerhaus (Germany), who highlighted how debt cancellation and reforms of the current financial system can contribute to peace-building and a just future.

Each day of the conference featured interactive workshops, panel discussions, keynote speeches, networking opportunities, and film screenings. On the third day, Melani participated in the panel “Towards a People's Peace: Path-ways to a Just & Peaceful World”. Alongside Lubna Alkanawati from Women Now for Development (Syria), Dylan Matthews from Peace Direct (UK), and Rand Sayej from the Humanitarian Youth Group (Palestine), Melani shared her vision for a just financial system. She emphasised the urgency to strategize proactively and dismantle the current oppressive and neocolonial system—one that perpetuates slow and structural violence in the Global South through debt dependencies, exploitative trade, extractivism, and the growing commodification of Global South countries and their peoples for private profit.

As 54 countries in the global South are currently facing a debt crisis, including her home country, Sri Lanka, she highlighted that austerity measures imposed by the IMF are impacting social security. She explained how the existing global financial architecture—dominated by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank—is grounded in colonial governance structures, human rights violations and continues to serve the interests of wealthy nations and corporations. These institutions prioritize the repayment of external, often illegitimate debts, while ignoring the far greater debts owed by rich countries. She pointed out that it is, in fact, the global North that owes the global South—due to their historical and ongoing roles when it comes to the climate crisis, colonialism, slavery, illicit financial flows, and the failure to meet financial commitments made at the United Nations. According to ActionAid’s 2025 report Who Owes Who, the climate debt alone owed by wealthy nations to low- and lower-middle-income countries totals US$107 trillion—more than 70 times the global South’s external debt of US$1.45 trillion.

The panel concluded with a powerful quote from Martin Luther King Jr., shared by moderator Gino Govinder, a seasoned civil society and trade union activist from South Africa:“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”

And that is exactly what we at Debt for Climate are doing. Join us in our fight for a just world—one that puts people and the planet first by cancelling the debt of the global South!