PARIS: A global climate summit wrapped up on Friday with leaders agreeing that the international financial system was woefully inadequate in an era of global warming, after taking a number of small steps to helping debt-burdened developing nations.
While host country France pitched the conference as a consensus-building exercise, leaders were under pressure to produce clear outcomes from the two-day meeting as economies stagger under growing debt after successive crises in recent years.
The summit comes amid warnings that the world’s ability to curb global warming is reliant on a massive increase in clean energy investment in developing countries.
French President Emmanuel Macron hailed a “complete consensus” to reform global financial institutions and make them “more efficient, fairer and better suited to the world of today”.
Some 40 national leaders gathered in Paris, most from developing countries whose economies have been buffeted by a succession of crises in recent years, including COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, soaring inflation and extreme weather events.
The conference heard time and again that the nearly 80-year-old financial system — underpinned by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund — was no longer fit-for-purpose in facing 21st-century challenges.
While there was agreement on the broad outlines of the problem, there was less progress on steering the global financial juggernaut in a new direction, though there were several incremental initiatives and advancements on existing promises. – AFP
