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.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
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