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. “The main problem is the guys who caused the problem are in denial. It is not Africa who caused this problem,” said Ibrahim, whose foundation conducts public policy research across the continent. “Don’t come to me and compromise my development because of your mishap.” In an hour-long discussion that was at times lively and at times technical, the panelists presented different perspectives on access to global capital, climate mitigation, and the private sector’s role in development across Africa. Other panels in the day-long forum focused on agricultural development and mining. Rémy Rioux, head of the French Development Agency, said governments should work to create a modern financial framework that will encourage public and private investments in projects that will address both climate and development. “We need this new public framework,” Rioux said. “We need to protect and fund the most vulnerable, but at the same time, we have to leverage private funds to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect our environment.” Lionel Zinsou, an economist and former prime minister of West Africa’s Benin, said many African countries don’t attract more international capital because they lack institutions that inspire confidence in foreign investors. It’s easier to fund reforestation projects in Oceania than in Africa, he said, because officials there can build trust with investors or lenders more easily. “I think we need to focus on mobilizing the private sector, so moving away from talking about development banks or large industrial companies,” he said. Perhaps the most vigorous rejection of the climate-change-versus-development dilemma came from Sudan’s Nisreen Elsaim, former chair of the Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change to the United Nations secretary-general. She said partnerships between high-income and low- and middle-income economies invariably favor the rich. She illustrated a proposal for a new paradigm through an analogy of two people trying to pluck apples from a tree. The high-income economies stand in the area where the apples hang low because the tree leans the lowest, and they can access a ladder to retrieve even more apples. Meanwhile, poorer economies standing below higher-hanging branches can reach few or no apples at all. The solution wouldn’t be more ladders but rather planting trees that grow straight and everyone can access, she said. “This is the justice and the fair transition that I’m talking about,” she said. “We don’t want a development process where there is another blood diamond or blood cobalt or blood gold or blood resources.” Ibrahim, the Sudanese philanthropist, delivered a blunt critique of rich countries’ priorities. Higher-income economies disproportionately contribute to global carbon emissions — the leading cause of global warming — and should therefore do most of the work to curtail emissions and mitigate warming effects, he said. Ibrahim advocated for levying a tax on carbon emissions worldwide. According to the World Bank, in 2020 the metric tons of carbon emitted per person in the United States was 13; in China, it was 7.8; and in the European Union, it was 5.5. In sub-Saharan Africa, it was 0.7. “You want to use [13] tons? Go ahead, but pay,” Ibrahim said. “Then the funds that become available go to preserve the Amazon or to preserve the Congo Basin.” Ibrahim said he was pessimistic about the lack of global cooperation and that countries in the global north should assume more responsibility for their contributions to rising temperatures, which disproportionately impact African countries. “I’m sorry to give a negative message, but guys, wake up,” he said. “We keep on having summits and meetings, but they’re not working.”