International community urged to adjust approach to climate change

Prime Minister Mia Mottley continues to lobby from the world stage for the international community to rethink its climate finance policy as she re-stated her position on global climate finance reform.

Speaking during a Rockefeller Foundation panel discussion on the Road to COP28 last week, Mottley reminded the audience that tackling the climate crisis required a global coordinated effort and must be done in such a way that developing countries, which were most vulnerable, were not disenfranchised.

The discussion, which occurred on the sidelines of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings in Washington, DC, was around the theme of multilateral development bank reform and how the Global North could speed up resource allocation to the Global South to address climate change.

In her brief presentation, Mottley reiterated that the developed world and international financial institutions had to significantly adjust their approach to supporting developing states to adapt to climate change.

Under the current structure, she said, global financial institutions reinforced the poverty levels of developing states, noting that there were remnants of imperialism within their frameworks.

“We believe that we need to be more laser-like and ensure that there is not a rift placed between us and low income countries as is being attempted to maintain the status quo. In the same way, the World Bank evolved to deal with reconstruction and [the] eventual elimination of poverty, it cannot be equal to today’s time without dealing with global commons. The global commons are much wider than just simply dealing with the state of poverty but they threaten the state of prosperity to bring people back into poverty and that is really the reason why we have to deal with the global commons. In addition to that it threatens the very earth . . .,” she said.

Mottley added that if the international community did not move swiftly to address the matter and did not realise this was the time to change “we are in trouble”. 

“I am satisfied that there is movement being made but the movement is not sufficiently fast or broad . . . This next set of summers and winters are going to change everything because quite frankly the global population is not going to stand for the status quo when temperatures are rising way above anything that is humanly sustainable and temperatures are falling to within the temperature on Mars.

“We believe that debt sustainability cannot be kicked down the road or cannot be treated as an apostrophe to the conversation . . . If we don’t recognise that there has to be a different approach then we are in trouble.

“This is not about climate alone, climate is only one of the Sustainable Development Goals . . . Therefore, you cannot divorce climate from development finance. What is at stake is a trust deficit between the global north and the global south . . . 

“The world cannot be shaped by simply an old order. It has to be shaped by transparency, fairness and a just transition in every sense of the word, which means understanding why there is not the attraction to be able to move capital to the south . . .”

Last year during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, Mottley announced the Bridgetown Initiative, which called for an overhaul of the global climate change policy that allowed first world nations to borrow climate finance at a much lower interest rate than developing countries. 

Back then, Mottley called for the quality and quantity of climate finance to be improved. (SZB)