Last week, I discussed the dire financial situation of the poorest countries. This week’s “summit for a new global financing pact” in Paris offers an opportunity to deal with this challenge. It also offers a chance of making the investments needed for a transition to a low-emissions economy.
This is the central point of a new paper by Avinash Persaud, who advised Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados on the influential Bridgetown Agenda for the Reform of the Global Financial Architecture. In “Unblocking the green transformation in developing countries with a partial foreign exchange guarantee”, he analyses how to make sufficient affordable finance available for renewable energy projects in emerging and developing countries, an issue also considered in last year’s expert group report, Finance for Climate Action.
Over the past 270 years, Europe and North America have contributed more than 70 per cent of the stock of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. This has also exhausted almost all of the planet’s carbon budget. But today emerging and developing countries generate some 63 per cent of emissions, a share that is bound to grow. It follows that there must not only be huge cuts in emissions, but a huge part of those cuts, particularly relative to trend, must be made by emerging and developing countries. To achieve this, investment in the green transition in these countries (other than China) needs to reach some $2.4tn a year (6.5 per cent of gross domestic product) by 2030.