Takeaways from the Paris Summit to Fix Global Climate Finance.

More than 40 global leaders attended the conference in Paris on June 23 to build momentum for a climate-ready financial system. Two days of talks were aimed to increase support from rich countries to poor countries facing crisis.
The negotiations resulted in an eight-page document of dense verbiage. The document cites vague indicators of progress like support for carbon credits, biodiversity credits and debt for nature swaps. Event hosts, French President Emmanuel Macron and Barbados PM Mia Motley frequently repeated the need to have concrete outcomes. These are the main takeaways.

Quicker access to cash – Most countries were still focusing efforts on quicker access to cash. Rich countries made a commitment to secure $100 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to IMF members based on the size of their economies during the last meet in 2021. Countries can access these funds in case of emergencies without adding to their debt burden. These type of funds are required by poorer countries facing down climate disasters, but the access is overly restricted to them due to their small economic size. The idea was then to re-allocate a portion of SDRs from rich to poor countries. France stated an allocation of 40% of it’s SDRs.

An Emergency Toolkit – The impacts of climate change a getting more extreme forcing countries to take more debt to recover. Thus creating a climate-debt trap. The remedy envisaged to deal with this is to deploy advance warning systems to reduce the damage and debt pauses to curb accumulation of debt during dark times.

These are some of the many ideas touted in the conference, but the success of which are lacking due to low buy-ins.