IN A NUTSHELL Author's Note...What’s missing is not data or technical capacity—but political will, ethical clarity, and courage. The Seville Platform for Action announced 130 initiatives, but none establishes the kind of global tax justice framework SHEM and others have long demanded: a multilateral system to tax wealth, extractive profits, and digital monopolies, with revenues invested in regenerative public goods. In essence, Seville revealed a troubling asymmetry: an ever-expanding architecture to protect capital, and a shrinking one to protect life. Without enforceable public redistribution, climate resilience, universal healthcare, and equitable education will remain hostage to market volatility and elite priorities...
By Juan Garay
Professor and Researcher in Ethics and Metrics of Health Equity (Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil)
Seville 2025: 5% for War, 0.25% for Life?
By the same Author on PEAH: see HERE and HERE
The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4), held in Seville in July 2025, was marked by grand rhetoric and a flood of lofty pledges. Yet despite the launch of numerous innovation platforms and voluntary coalitions under the so-called Seville Commitment, the conference left a gaping moral and political void: its failure to secure meaningful public redistribution for sustainable equity, especially through binding commitments on Official Development Assistance (ODA).
The numbers speak for themselves. ODA remains stalled at just 0.3% of donor countries’ GDP, far short of the long-standing 0.7% target. No new binding commitment was made in Seville to bridge this decades-old gap. Instead, the spotlight shifted to mobilizing private capital—through blended finance platforms, sustainability-linked bonds, and risk-sharing schemes aimed at enticing profit-driven investors into development spaces. While such mechanisms may produce limited benefits, they effectively outsource global equity to the market, turning rights into returns.
This omission becomes even more disturbing when set against other global spending priorities. At the recent NATO summit, member states agreed to raise military spending to 5% of GDP, citing geopolitical instability. The richest nations on Earth appear ready to spend trillions on weapons, yet they recoil at allocating even 0.7% of their wealth to support planetary wellbeing.
The recent Sustainable Health Equity Movement-SHEM webinar series on global income thresholds and redistribution has exposed the profound injustice behind this disparity. As outlined in these sessions, a minimum of 7% of global GDP must be redistributed annually to guarantee sustainable wellbeing and equity—preventing an estimated 15 million avoidable deaths per year. This would mean redirecting resources from countries with per capita GDPs above the “excess threshold” to communities suffering from ecological collapse and structural exclusion.
Seville did briefly acknowledge redistribution—by recommending that low-income countries raise domestic tax revenues to at least 15% of GDP, a long-standing IMF benchmark. Yet such expectations are deeply unfair in the absence of any serious commitment to global redistribution, especially from the wealthiest nations. These countries often lack the fiscal space, infrastructure, or political autonomy to reach those targets without external support—particularly in a global economy where tax rules still favor multinational corporations and extractive elites.
What’s missing is not data or technical capacity—but political will, ethical clarity, and courage. The Seville Platform for Action announced 130 initiatives, but none establishes the kind of global tax justice framework SHEM and others have long demanded: a multilateral system to tax wealth, extractive profits, and digital monopolies, with revenues invested in regenerative public goods.
In essence, Seville revealed a troubling asymmetry: an ever-expanding architecture to protect capital, and a shrinking one to protect life. Without enforceable public redistribution, climate resilience, universal healthcare, and equitable education will remain hostage to market volatility and elite priorities.
We are witnessing a world where less than 0.3% of the surplus income hoarded by wealthy nations is dedicated to lifting those below the global minimum threshold of wellbeing. Meanwhile, military spending outpaces ODA by a factor of 20 to 1. Global governance remains oligarchic, as exemplified by the UN Security Council, enabling wars, genocides, and the protection of privilege through force.
SHEM affirms that wellbeing cannot be commodified. Equity is not a side effect of financial engineering—it is a right that requires structural redistribution. The tools exist. What the world needs now is a profound moral realignment: from profit to planet, from militarism to mutual care, from charity to justice.
For reference of the analysis and proposals of global tax Justice for global wellbeing in sustainable equity see:
https://www.peah.it/2023/12/12800/
https://www.peah.it/2024/12/14117/
SHEM webinars : https://www.sustainablehealthequity.org/webnair