Just not good enough

G20 leaders have missed their opportunity to show leadership on climate justice and tackling the effects of climate change on the poorest people in the world. They could have begun to set out a path to get us back on track for a global deal post 2012. They didn’t, and that’s just not good enough.

For a fairer world, we need our leaders to find new sources of finance, switch off the subsidies for fossil fuels and dedicate the revenue to investing in clean energy, which would lay the foundation for a breakthrough at the climate summit in Cancun later this year.

We must see at least $200 billion per year of new and additional public finance by 2020. And, despite efforts by the leaders of France and Germany ahead of the summit for a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) to be discussed as a possible source for climate finance, it appears that little progress was made at this summit on agreeing the new sources to raise the finance needed, such as FTT and levies on aviation and shipping fuel emissions.

On tackling corruption, we welcome the G20’s support for the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), but it’s disappointing not to see a strong call for a review mechanism. A good starting point for action would be to see Germany and Japan, the only G8 countries not to have ratified UNCAC, doing so straight away.

And it’s good to see development coming on to the G20 agenda, especially as the countries represented include many where extreme poverty is still a very real issue.

Let’s hope the G20 does better at shaping the development agenda ahead of Seoul than the half-hearted attempt by the G8 ‘rich club’ to address poverty, which just repackaged old commitments and missed the opportunity to reference Gleneagles and take us forward in tackling poverty and injustice.