G7 leaders pledge $100bn/y to fight climate change

G7 leaders in Cornwall, UK, have agreed to raise their contributions to meet an ‘overdue’ spending pledge of $100bn/y by rich countries to help poorer countries cut carbon emissions and cope with global warming. However, only two nations offered firm promises of more cash, according to a Reuters report.

Alongside plans to help developing countries fund a shift to renewable and sustainable technology, the world's seven largest economies again pledged to meet the climate finance target. But climate groups said the promise made in the June summit’s final communique lacked detail and should have been more ambitious.

In the communique, the seven nations – the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan – reaffirmed their commitment to ‘jointly mobilise $100bn/y from public and private sources, through to 2025… Towards this end, we commit to each increase and improve our overall international public climate finance contributions for this period and call on other developed countries to join and enhance their contributions to this effort.

Following the summit, Canada said it would double its climate finance pledge to C$5.3bn ($4.4bn) over the next five years and Germany would increase its by €2–6bn ($7.26bn) a year by 2025 at the latest.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, host of the gathering in Carbis Bay, told a news conference that developed nations had to move further, faster. ‘G7 countries account for 20% of global carbon emissions, and we were clear this weekend that action has to start with us,’ he said. ‘And while it's fantastic that every one of the G7 countries has pledged to wipe out our contributions to climate change, we need to make sure we're achieving that as fast as we can and helping developing countries at the same time.’

The Energy Institute’s CEO, Nick Wayth CEng FEI, commented: ‘There's a general recognition that the G7 countries – historically among the biggest emitting and most wealthy countries in the world – have a particular responsibility to tackle their own greenhouse gas emissions and to support sustainable growth and climate adaptation in less developed countries. The scale and pace of action and investment required remains substantial, but we should perhaps see this week’s meeting in Cornwall as a staging post on the way to the all-important COP26 talks in Glasgow in November.’

Some green groups were unimpressed with the climate pledges, however. Catherine Pettengell, Director at Climate Action Network, said the G7 had failed to rise to the challenge of agreeing on concrete commitments on climate finance. ‘We had hoped that the leaders of the world's richest nations would come away from this week having put their money where their mouth is,’ she said.

Back in 2009, major developed countries had agreed at the United Nations to jointly contribute $100bn each year by 2020 in climate finance to poorer countries, many of whom are grappling with rising seas, storms and droughts made worse by climate change. That target was not met, derailed in part by the coronavirus pandemic that also forced the UK to postpone the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow until November this year.

The G7 also said 2021 should be a ‘turning point for our planet’, accelerating efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and keeping the 1.5^oC global warming threshold within reach.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the G7 leaders had agreed to phase-out coal. But the communique spoke in more general terms: ‘We have committed to rapidly scale-up technologies and policies that further accelerate the transition away from unabated coal capacity, consistent with our 2030 NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) and net zero commitment.’

The communique also pledged to work together to tackle carbon leakage – the risk that tough climate policies could cause companies to relocate to regions where they can continue to pollute cheaply. But there were few details on how G7 members would manage to cut emissions.