The heads of State in France and Barbados united their efforts on Thursday June 22, to advocate for a comprehensive transformation of the global financial system during a summit with the goal of addressing poverty and climate change.
The leaders of France and Barbados joined forces on Thursday to push for an overhaul of the international financial system at a summit aimed at tackling poverty and climate change.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who is hosting the two-day conference in Paris, 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.
In his opening remarks, Macron 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.
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.
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.
Outlining the challenges facing developing countries, UN 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”.
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.
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.
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.
Khalil Wakim, with AFP
