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France and Spain agree to tax private jets and premium flyers

On Monday, a group of countries, including France, Kenya and Spain, pledged to tax private jets and premium-class flights in order to raise money for climate action. Despite the fact that many wealthy nations are reducing their official development assistance to developing countries and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, others have looked for new funding sources, such as taxing polluting industry. The announcement made on the first day of the U.N. Development Summit in Seville, Spain was the first from the "Sevilla Platform for Action", which aims to implement the new global financing framework that had been agreed before the event.

In a press release, the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's office stated that "the aim is to improve green taxation as well as foster international solidarity through more progressive and harmonised taxes systems." The Global Solidarity Levies Task Force announced that the European Commission will provide technical support to the initiative. Sierra Leone, Benin and Antigua-Barbuda were also co-signatories.

In November 2023, the task force will be launched to investigate new forms of taxation to support developing countries in their efforts to decarbonise themselves and protect themselves from climate change. In a recent task force report, they said that in addition to an aviation tax that could raise billions, other sectors could be taxed, including shipping, oil and gasoline, cryptocurrency, and the super-rich.

Kenyan President William Ruto stated that "many of these ideas are not novel, as other countries have had levies like this."

What we need is political will. We can't keep on talking about the need for change without actually implementing it. "The world is watching, and it expects real results."

Rebecca Newsom, of the environmentalist group Greenpeace, called the move an "important step" towards making sure that those who abuse this sector and are not taxed fairly pay their fair share.

She said that it was "obvious", the next step, to hold oil and natural gas companies accountable. Reporting by David Latona from Seville, and Simon Jessop from London; editing by Mark Potter and Paul Simao

(source: Reuters)