G7 talks wrap up with climate pledge
Seven world leaders to raise contributions to meet a spending pledge of $100bn/yr by rich nations to help poorer ones cut carbon emissions
G7 leaders agreed on Sunday to raise their contributions to meet an overdue spending pledge of $100 billion a year by rich countries to help poorer ones cut carbon emissions and cope with global warming. Campaigners, however, pointed out that firm cash promises were missing.
Alongside plans billed as helping speed funding of infrastructure projects in developing countries and a shift to renewable and sustainable technology, the world’s seven most advanced economies again pledged to meet the climate finance target.
But climate groups said the promise - in a copy of a draft communique seen by Reuters lacked detail, most importantly a figure for the increases.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said individual nations were expected to set out the size of the increases “in due course”.
Countering China
There was a clear push by leaders at the G7 summit in Carbis Bay in England to try to counter China’s increasing influence in the world, particularly among developing nations. The leaders earlier signalled their desire to build a rival to Beijing’s multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative but the details were few and far between.
In the draft communique, the seven nations - the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - reaffirmed their commitment to “mobilise $100 billion per year from public and private sources, through to 2025”.
“Towards this end, we commit to each increase and improve our overall international public climate finance contributions for this period and call on other developed countries to join and enhance their contributions to this effort,” the G7 said.
In statement released late on Saturday, G7 host Johnson had said, “Protecting our planet is the most important thing we as leaders can do for our people.”
“As democratic nations, we have a responsibility to help developing countries reap the benefits of clean growth through a fair and transparent system. The G7 has an unprecedented opportunity to drive a global green industrial revolution, with the potential to transform the way we live,” he had said.
Some green groups were unimpressed with the climate pledges.
Catherine Pettengell, director at Climate Action Network, an umbrella group for advocacy organisations, said the G7 had failed to rise to the challenge of agreeing on concrete commitments on climate finance.
“We had hoped that the leaders of the world’s richest nations would come away from this week having put their money their mouth is,” she said.
Developed countries agreed at the United Nations in 2009 to together contribute $100 billion each year by 2020 in climate finance to poorer countries, many of whom are grappling with rising seas, storms and droughts made worse by climate change.
That target was not met, derailed in part by the coronavirus pandemic that also forced the British government to postpone the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference (COP26) until later this year.