Dollars but no revolution: the two-day summit hosted by France ended on Friday with some progress in favor of poor countries but without yet materializing the Big Bang hoped for to reorient global finance in the service of the climate.
At the end of the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed a “complete consensus” to “reform in depth” the global financial system.
But the meeting ended with a series of small steps without the big joint statement hoped for a time by the French presidency, which simply published its own “summary” of the discussions in the afternoon.
Paris again welcomed some forty heads of state and government on Friday, including the Brazilian Lula, in a meeting supposed to materialize ideas born at the last COP, in Egypt, before the next one, in the United Arab Emirates at the end of the ‘year.
A few announcements were made at the Palais Brongniart, the former headquarters of the Paris Stock Exchange.
Several countries (Barbados, Spain, United States, France, United Kingdom), with the World Bank, have thus supported a system of automatic suspension of debt repayment in the event of a natural disaster.
Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, had been pushing for months to transform the financial system with such a clause in particular.
“It’s a good day, because almost everyone has accepted the validity of the natural disaster clauses,” jubilant the leader in an interview with AFP Thursday evening before a big concert for the climate in front of the Eiffel Tower.
“Climate Chaos”
In a long passionate tirade, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for his part deplored pell-mell on Friday the inertia of the international community in the fight against climate change and the reduction of inequalities, as well as the protectionism of Westerners. .
He sharply criticized the international financial institutions: “he who is rich is always rich and he who is poor is always poor”.
Faced with the immense expectations for dealing with the climate crisis, the progress made at the summit still seemed meager to part of civil society. “The mountain gave birth to a mouse,” lamented Greenpeace.
“The summit ends without explicit recognition of the polluter-pays principle”, regrets the NGO, which would like companies in the fossil sector to “pay for climate chaos”.
More than 350 people also gathered Friday morning at the foot of the Statue of the Republic in Paris, environmental activists turning giant black dollars into green dollars to encourage political leaders to stop investing in fossil fuels and switch in green finance.
“We are in favor of an international tax on maritime transport because it is a sector that is not taxed,” also said Emmanuel Macron, who would like to see this issue taken forward at a future meeting of the Maritime Organization. International (IMO) in early July.
The presidency counted a coalition of 22 countries (including Denmark, Greece, Vietnam and even New Zealand), with the European Commission, supporting this initiative.
But this thorny question still seems far from reaching a consensus. “If China, the United States and several key European countries that also have big companies involved do not follow us, then you put a tax in place but it has no effect,” Macron said.
“Difficult decisions”
The summit had, however, made some further progress on Thursday. Rich countries will thus pay Senegal to help it get rid of heavy fuel oil in its energy. Zambia will see its debt reduced, an announcement hailed in Lusaka, where parliamentarians sang the national anthem to mark their joy.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for its part, will increase its funding for poor countries to $100 billion.
“The Paris summit raised hopes for a radical reform of the global financial system,” commented Nick Mabey, co-director of the influential think tank E3G. “The challenge now is to implement this vision in the coming year, which will require intense diplomacy and difficult decisions”, underlines the observer.
In its proposed “roadmap” for the coming months, France has already marked a series of important meetings with the G20 summit in India in September, followed by the autumn meetings of the World Bank and the IMF, then COP28 in Dubai at the end of the year.