Countries on the front lines of climate change are seeking a new lifeline in Paris
An unusual, if guarded, optimism has descended on Paris, along with hundreds of world leaders, bankers and climate activists. They come for a two-day conference billed as the new Bretton Woods.
The reference is to the 1944 rally in New Hampshire where diplomats struck the monetary institutions to rebuild countries after World War II — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The goal now is to rebuild those systems to weather a looming crisis: the intertwined dangers of poverty and climate change.
“We don’t have to choose between the fight against poverty and the fight for climate and biodiversity,” French President Emmanuel Macron argued last year.
Many believe that a new international monetary system is in the making, one that will provide financial support rather than crippling debt to developing countries facing climate crises.
On Wednesday, on the eve of the conference, 13 world leaders, including President Biden, published a public letter in some 40 newspapers, including Le Monde, saying they were determined “to forge a new global consensus” and that the summit would stand out as a “decisive political moment”.
There is also fear. Some worry that the conference could become another big summit, held by a leader who loves his self-proclaimed role as multilateral consensus-builder and disruptor, but doesn’t always deliver results.
“The French president has a penchant for international initiatives, but he has been president for more than six years now and his energy and confidence are exhausted,” said Cécile Duflot, director general of France’s poverty-fighting group Oxfam. The summit, she said, should result in concrete promises of debt relief and not just “chat.”
“Today when you have 62 countries paying more in debt than in health care, it is clear that we are in a dysfunctional system,” Ms Duflot said.
The conference did not come from the ideas of Mr Macron, but from the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley.
Last November, Mrs. Mottley outlined a proposal for financial reform from the stage of the United Nations Climate Summit, known as COP27, in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. She and her team called it the Bridgetown Initiative.
Mrs. Mottley described the financial systems created three-quarters of a century ago as “imperial,” set up as they were before many countries in the world had gained independence. She called for sweeping reform so that developing countries most vulnerable to climate change disasters – and already facing debt crises – can access capital to tackle poverty and damage and accelerate their transition to a green economy. pay.
“Yes, it’s time for us to revisit Bretton Woods,” Ms Mottley said.
The response was thunderous, if unexpected: Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the IMF, endorsed the need for reform. Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, announced that he was also on board. So did the CEO of Bank of America.
Mr Macron, who already organized international summits on biodiversityprotection of the oceans and woods, was also exuberant. The project seemed like a natural choice for the president of the country that hosted the Paris Climate Agreement, and he announced soon a summit in Paris to move forward on some of the proposals.
On the agenda are many of the things Ms. Mottley has called for: using public money to attract large-scale private investment for developing countries; increasing those countries’ access to financial assistance from the IMF; and allowing countries to pause payments on international loans after a climate-related disaster.
Among those in attendance are German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Chinese Premier Li Qiang. Just like Janet Yellen, the US Secretary of the Treasury.
“In my eight years of campaigning, there has never been anything like this — heads of state like this with the political will to radically reshape the architecture of international finance,” said Daniel Boese, a campaigner for the advocacy group Avaaz.
Just five years ago, discussing World Bank reform would have been taboo, said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and one of the architects of the 2015 Paris agreement. But since then, the economic situation in many developing countries in the world has deteriorated significantly, she said.
“We need political leadership, and he is positioned to do that because he understands all these issues,” Ms Tubiana said of Macron. “I hope he’s really looking for that.”
The summit attracts the heads of state or top ministers from about 80 countries, including leading global economies, and smaller indebted countries already suffering the effects of climate change, such as Guinea-Bissau, Haiti and Saint-Vincent and the Grenadines.
Last week, Mr. Macron’s team fell out recalls that the purpose of the event is not to make concrete announcements, but to facilitate the path to agreements at later meetings, notably the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF, the G20 Summit, the next United Nations Climate Change Conference and the general assembly of the International Maritime Organization, which is under pressure to tax emissions from the shipping industry.
“If that gets a lot of support here, and then actually gets agreed at the IMO summit in July, that’s huge,” said Mr. Boese. “Three years ago we would have celebrated such a result at a climate conference.”
Many of the activists pouring into the city say they are happy to see more seats at the table for leaders from the global south, and President Macron is using his powerful office to amplify the proposal of a woman of color from a small island country – Ms. . mottled. But they are lobbying to get more controversial issues on the agenda, most notably a tax on the fossil fuel industry, as well as the super-rich who live jet-set lives.
“Climate finance is great, but if we don’t stop the fossil fuel industry, then it’s just a Band-Aid solution,” said Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate justice campaigner from the Philippines, a country regularly battered by typhoons. “I grew up with a fear of drowning in my own bedroom.”
Patience Nabukalu came from Uganda, where the French oil company TotalEnergies has oil wells and the 870-mile long East African crude oil pipeline. The project has been regarded by its detractors as a “carbon bomb” and a potential threat to the drinking water of 40 million people living around the Lake Victoria basin. The Macron government has quietly supported the project.
“Let him prove us wrong because we think these are just empty promises, but show him they are true by stepping forward and calling for this project to be stopped,” said Ms Nabukalu, 25. no financial reform will take place if you continue to fund fossil fuel projects.”
Aureline Breeden and Juliette Gueron-Gabrielle contributed reports from Paris.