A global climate summit wrapped up on Friday with leaders agreeing that the international financial system was woefully inadequate in an era of global warming, after taking a number of small steps to helping debt-burdened developing nations.
While host country France pitched the conference as a consensus-building exercise, leaders were under pressure to produce clear outcomes from the two-day meeting as economies stagger under growing debt after successive crises over the past few years.
The summit comes amid warnings that the world’s ability to curb global warming is reliant on a massive increase in clean energy investment in developing countries.
Photo: EPA-EFE
French President Emmanuel Macron hailed a “complete consensus” to reform global financial institutions and make them “more efficient, fairer and better suited to the world of today.”
About 40 national leaders gathered in Paris, most from developing countries whose economies have been buffeted by crises in recent years, including COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, soaring inflation and extreme weather events.
The conference heard time and again that the nearly 80-year-old financial system — underpinned by the World Bank and the IMF — was no longer fit-for-purpose in facing 21st century challenges.
“With this mechanism, the rich are always rich and the poor are always poor,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said.
While there was agreement on the broad outlines of the problem, there was less progress on steering the global financial juggernaut in a new direction, although there were several incremental initiatives and advancements on existing promises.
World Bank President Ajay Banga on Thursday said the lender would introduce a “pause” mechanism on debt repayments for countries hit by a crisis so they could “focus on what matters.”
One key announcement came from IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, who said a pledge to shift US$100 billion of liquidity-boosting “special drawing rights” into a climate and poverty fund had been met.
Overall, the progress made was “not sufficient,” said Friederike Roder, vice president of global advocacy at Global Citizen, adding that the IMF target included a US pledge of US$21 billion that is stuck at the US Congress.
However, she said the meeting had managed to “totally change the conversation” on tough issues that have up to now been mostly kicked into the long grass.
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