The French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday at the start of the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in Paris that global financial reform will top the agenda of the meeting.
Macron noted that the event will specifically focus on helping the most vulnerable developing countries tackle poverty and climate change.
Addressing these challenges will take increased private funding and a public finances overhaul, stressed Macron, who had revealed plans to host the summit after COP27 international climate conference in November 2022.
In a joint article in the French daily Le Monde, Macron and 13 other political leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden last week emphasized their urgent commitment to combating poverty and inequality.
They expressed concerns that climate change will lead to more frequent and devastating disasters, disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations.
The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Thursday that rich countries had met a target of reallocating $100 billion of funds from the institution to battle climate change and poverty in developing countries.
“We meet the target, we do have the 100 billion,” Kristalina Georgieva told a roundtable discussion at the summit.
Ahead of the summit, the IMF still needed another $40 billion to hit the target, she said.
The plan, first announced in 2019, was for wealthier countries to recycle $100 billion in IMF special drawing rights (SDRs) for vulnerable economies.
SDRs are foreign exchange reserve assets awarded to countries based on how much they contribute to the IMF.
The idea, which some European countries resisted, was for wealthier countries to lend these foreign exchange reserve assets to the IMF, which could in turn lend them to developing economies.
Ahead of the summit, France and Japan announced that they would redeploy 30% of their SDRs for this purpose.
Veteran president of Congo, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, however, highlighted how pledges from rich countries to help vulnerable countries had failed to materialize, including a promise to provide $100 billion a year at a COP climate summit in Copenhagen in 2019.
“Every time there’s a COP meeting we make the same announcements. In Copenhagen, it was announced that there would be $100 billion per year for poor countries, but we never saw it. It didn’t reach us,” he said.
