French President Emmanuel Macron has said his country will sign an agreement with Bangladesh to finance climate-change adaptation and loss and damage in the first half of 2024.
The French Development Agency will be contributing €1 billion ($1.1 billion) in investment, and the IMF will be extending up to $1 billion worth of SDRs (Special Drawing Rights) in new loans, Macron said.
“This also implies identifying, on a global scale, governance mechanisms for the most crucial challenges we will have to face in the coming years, access to water being one of the most pressing. In this regard, France and Kazakhstan will convene a One Water Summit during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024,” wrote the French president in an article, titled “Pillars of Green Wisdom,” published by the Project Syndicate on Wednesday.
For the most vulnerable countries, he said, they must create conditions that enable them to finance their climate-change mitigation and adaptation efforts and access the green technologies that are the new engines of growth.
“This implies going further than traditional ‘official development assistance’ and doing for vulnerable countries what rich countries did for themselves during the Covid-19 pandemic: pursue an unorthodox fiscal and monetary policy,” wrote President Macron.
“The results are already there: in two years, following the initiative we took in Paris in the spring of 2021, we have released over $100 billion in special drawing rights (SDRs, the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset) for vulnerable countries,” he wrote.
By activating this “dormant asset”, Macron said they are extending 20-year loans at near-zero interest rates to finance climate action and pandemic preparedness in the poorest countries.
“We have begun to change debt rules to suspend payments for such countries, should a climate shock occur. And we have changed the mandate of multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, so that they take more risks and mobilize more private money,” he said.
Macron said they are going to continue working on this, including within the framework of the new loss and damage fund, where they must mobilize new private insurance mechanisms in the face of climate risk. “We will start from the specific needs of the hardest-hit countries.”
The French president said they will not succeed if they cannot reform the World Bank and the IMF, which play a prominent role in establishing the norms and financing the green transition on a global scale.
Eighty years after their creation, these institutions remain underfunded, relative to the size of the global economy and population, and emerging and developing countries continue to be shut out of their governance, he said.
“But we will not be able to agree on goals and financing until every country negotiating is on an equal footing. To this end, we must review Bretton Woods governance, and ask emerging countries to assume their share of accountability in financing global public goods,” said Macron.
He said, “We must not allow the ongoing war in Ukraine and the fighting in Gaza to distract us from collective efforts to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, save our biodiversity, and fight poverty and inequality.”
The world’s most advanced economies, which have also been the main CO2 emitters since the industrial revolution, must move away from fossil fuels, he noted.
He also wrote, “Science has set the trajectory: we must move away from coal by 2030, from oil by 2045, and from gas by 2050. While the G7 countries bear the greatest responsibility, China, which is now the second-largest emitter in history, must be fully committed, too.”
“While it is the G7’s responsibility to move away from coal by 2030 (France will have done so in 2027), emerging economies are now the biggest coal consumers. In these countries, we need to speed up the financing of renewables, as well as nuclear power, which, as a manageable and a decarbonized energy source, must play a key role,” he wrote.
“We must also put private financing and trade at the service of the Paris agreement. The cost of investment must be higher for players in the fossil-fuel sector. We need a green interest rate and a brown interest rate. Similarly, we need a climate clause in our trade agreements, because we cannot simultaneously demand that our industries become greener while supporting the liberalization of international trade in polluting products.
“Moreover, we must focus on building the basis of a ‘bio-economy’ that will pay for the services provided by nature. Nature is our best technology to sequester carbon on a large scale. The countries with the most important carbon and biodiversity reserves, especially in the three main tropical forest basins, must obtain much greater resources, determined on a country-by-country basis, in exchange for their stewardship of these vital reserves. France has already launched three contracts of this type at COP28, with Papua New Guinea, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Macron wrote.
“But reform of the voluntary carbon market is essential. We need to create an international carbon and biodiversity exchange that will allow governmental and private actors to organize voluntary carbon credit swaps, based on sufficiently ambitious criteria to avoid greenwashing, and to remunerate local communities.
“The ocean is our most important carbon sink, and we must protect it. France and Costa Rica will convene the third United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice in June 2025, with the aim of updating international law, including on the prohibition of plastic pollution and on protection of the deep sea and seabed. These reforms would also enable the development of national strategies for seaboard protection by countries with exclusive economic zones,” the French president wrote.