The climate summit in Paris concluded this Friday with a “complete consensus” to “reform in depth” the world financial system, but without the expected revolution to fully accommodate the fight against global warming without compromising the reduction of poverty.
At the end of two days of debates before some 40 leaders, including those of Brazil, Colombia and Cuba, the Frenchman Emmanuel Macron welcomed a “complete consensus” to make the world financial system “more efficient” and “more equitable”.
But beyond the speech, the few concrete results of the event held in the former headquarters of the Stock Exchange in Paris, the Brongniart Palace, came mainly from groups of countries or coalitions of countries.
The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Barbados, among other countries, have agreed with the World Bank (WB) and other organizations on a system to suspend debt repayment in the event of natural catastrophes.
This was a claim by the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who, in an interview with AFP on Thursday, celebrated that “everyone” accepted this principle and called to “work together” because “only” exists “this planet ” to live.
Among the advances cited by Macron is an agreement by several creditor countries to restructure Zambia’s debt or the goal reached to reallocate 100 billion dollars of special drawing rights to poor countries, promised in 2021.
And he stressed that a 2009 promise to unlock another 100 billion dollars a year starting in 2020 to help poor countries deal with climate change will be fulfilled this year, belatedly.
But nonetheless, the NGO Climate Action Network (CAN) criticized the summit for “making something new out of something old” and bemoaned the idea of a possible suspension of repayments “rather than full debt cancellation”.
Lula and the weather “joke”
The summit was held under pressure from civil society, especially young environmental activists, including the Swedish Greta Thunberg, who demonstrated this Friday in the Place de la République in Paris to demand “green finance”.
Anne Cormille, a 22-year-old girl, thus lamented that the Paris summit “does not even talk about stopping the financing of fossil fuels”, despite being a source of the climate problems to which she must respond.
“The climate issue has become a joke,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva exclaimed for his part at the summit, denouncing the lack of “world governance” to comply with climate agreements.
The countries of the South advocate modernizing the role of multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to guide them in the fight against climate change, the fight against poverty, human development and the protection of biodiversity .
But confidence is low among the most vulnerable States, grouped in the so-called V20 group (composed of 58 countries), after a series of broken promises by the most developed nations.
“The climate crisis implies a great global investment Marshall plan,” based on taxing financial transactions and “exchanging debt for climate action,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced on Thursday.
But Macron did not cite the tax on financial transactions in his list of summit progress, nor did he cite the tax on carbon emissions from maritime transport that France was seeking to push for.
Tension over Mercosur
The Paris meeting lent itself to an intense schedule of bilateral meetings.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held a working lunch with Macron this Friday at the Elysee Palace, focused in part on the pending ratification of the free trade agreement between the European Union (EU) and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay). .
In a public forum of leaders prior to the closing of the summit, the Brazilian head of state raised the tone before Macron by attacking a series of additional environmental demands, which the EU raised to the South American bloc in March.
“It is not possible to have a strategic association and have an additional letter threatening a strategic partner,” Lula said.
The Brazilian leader indicated that the measures, included in that letter, currently prevent ratification, which the European Commission wanted before the end of the year. Macron received strong pressure from the French agricultural sector to oppose the alliance with Mercosur.