At Paris Peace Forum, a dilemma of climate vs. development

When the Paris Peace Forum first convened in 2018, it was sponsored by the French government as an annual meeting for top government, nonprofit, and business officials from around the world to address their most pressing common challenges. They’ve discussed armed conflict, the coronavirus pandemic, and cybersecurity.

But this week, at the sixth midyear meeting, most topics touched on the unavoidable: climate change. And with the forum meeting for the first time outside of France, in Ben Guerir, Morocco, organizers scheduled the first panel to tackle what they said was the dilemma of funding environmental sustainability versus developing the economies of African countries.

But the panel consisting of a top development official, a former prime minister, a former United Nations adviser, and a philanthropist — for different reasons — rejected that tension. Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese entrepreneur and founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, said high-income countries should assume a bigger responsibility for the warming planet.