The next two years will determine whether humanity can “save the world” by getting the climate emergency under control, and the bulk of the emission reductions will have to come from G20 countries, United Nations climate secretary Simon Stiell said Wednesday.
While “we still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble,” today’s national climate plans under the 2015 Paris Agreement “will barely cut emissions at all by 2030,” Stiell told a gathering at the UK’s Chatham House. Success will depend on the new generation of national climate pledges now under development—particularly by the G20 countries that account for 80% of global emissions—and on a “quantum leap” in climate finance that turns those national commitments into “investment plans for sustainable and strong economies.”
In developing countries, in particular, “it’s hard for any government to invest in renewables or climate resilience when the treasury coffers are bare, debt servicing costs have overtaken health spending, new borrowing is impossible, and the wolves of poverty are at the door,” Stiell declared. Yet “every day, finance ministers, CEOs, investors, and development bankers direct trillions of dollars. It’s time to shift those dollars from the energy and infrastructure of the past, towards that of a cleaner, more resilient future.”
A deal to make that happen will have to come out of this year’s COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, he added, and it’ll need four components to succeed:
• More concessional financing, especially for the poorest, most vulnerable countries;
• New sources of international finance;
• Reform of international financial institutions “to make them work better for developing countries, embed climate in their decision-making, and build a financial system fit for the 21st century”;
• Debt relief for the countries “that need it most to give them the fiscal space for climate investment”, when the developing world spends more than US$400 billion per year on debt service.
“Experts have shown that if we do all of this together, we can meet developing country needs, mobilizing hundreds of billions of dollars,” but “together we must pick up the pace,” Stiell said. At this year’s spring meetings of the World Bank in Washington, DC, “we can’t afford a talkfest without clear steps forward, when there is an opportunity to make real progress on every part of the new climate finance deal all nations need.”
