PARIS, France
French President Emmanuel Macron, who is hosting the two-day conference in Paris, told delegates that the world needs a "public finance shock" - a global surge of financing - to fight these challenges, adding the current system was not well suited to address global challenges.
"Policymakers and
countries shouldn't ever have to choose between reducing poverty and protecting
the planet," President Macron told the Summit for a New Global
Financial Pact.
Macron invited Barbadian Prime
Minister Mia Mottley to co-headline the event, which seeks to improve the
lending system for developing countries mired in poverty and threatened by
planet-heating emissions.
Ugandan climate campaigner Vanessa Nakate took the podium after Macron and
asked the audience to take a minute of silence for people who are suffering
from disasters.
With oil-rich Saudi Arabia's
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the crowd, she slammed the fossil fuel
industry, saying they promise development for poor communities but the energy
goes elsewhere and the profits "lie in the pockets of those who are
already extremely rich."
"It seems there is plenty
of money, so please do not tell us that we have to accept toxic air and barren
fields and poisoned water so that we can have development," she said.
Economies have been battered
by successive crises in recent years, including COVID-19, Russia's invasion of
Ukraine, spiking inflation, debt, and the spiraling cost of weather disasters.
Mottley, whose Caribbean
Island nation is threatened by rising sea levels and tropical storms, has
become a powerful advocate for reimagining the role of the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund in an era of climate crisis.
"What is required of us
now is absolute transformation and not reform of our institutions,"
Mottley said.
Barbados has put forward a
detailed plan for how to fix the global financial system to help developing
countries invest in clean energy and boost resilience to climate impacts.
"We come to Paris to
identify the common humanity that we share and the absolute moral imperative to
save our planet and to make it livable," said Mottley.
Outlining the challenges
facing developing countries, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said more
than 50 nations were now in-or-near debt default, while many African countries
are spending more on debt repayments than on healthcare.
Guterres said the post-World
War II global financial system was failing to rise to modern challenges and now
"perpetuates and even worsens inequalities."
"We can take steps right
now and take a giant leap towards global justice," he said, adding that he
has proposed stimulus of $500 billion a year for investments in sustainable
development and climate action.
In a nod to those looking for
tangible progress from the summit, IMF director Kristalina Georgieva announced
that a key pledge to re-channel $100 billion of liquidity boosting
"special drawing rights" into a climate and poverty fund had been
met.
"Ultimately it is the
future of humanity that is being discussed here," she told reporters.
Macron also said he was
hopeful that a 2009 pledge to deliver $100 billion a year in climate finance to
poorer nations by 2020 would finally be fulfilled this year - although actual
confirmation the money has been delivered will take months if not years.
The summit comes amid growing
recognition of the scale of the financial challenges ahead.
Last year, a U.N. expert group
said developing and emerging economies excluding China would need to spend
around $2.4 trillion a year on climate and development by 2030.
Countries are calling for
multilateral development banks to help unlock climate investments and
significantly increase lending, while stressing that new debt arrangements
should include, as Barbados has, disaster clauses allowing a country to pause
repayments for two years after an extreme weather event.
Other ideas on the table
include taxation on fossil fuel profits and financial transactions to raise
climate funds.
France backs the idea of an
international tax on carbon emissions from shipping, with hopes of a
breakthrough at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization in July.
Observers are also keenly
awaiting details of a plan from South American countries to create a global
structure for so-called debt-for-nature swaps.
Kenyan President William Ruto
said all these ideas should be explored and urged delegates not to see the
challenges facing the world as divided between the global north and south.
"Climate change will
consume all of us," he said.
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