Mia Mottley: The Caribbean queen of COP 27

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley invokes the revolutionary spirit of late Jamaican singer Bob Marley to rally leaders of low- and middle-income countries and demand greater concessions from the wealthy north in helping them confront the existential threat of global warming.

“Who will get up and stand up for the rights of our people?” she asked in September, quoting from the lyrics of the Wailers 1973 hit anthem Get Up, Stand Up.

The petition underscored Mottley’s knack for harnessing the power of popular language, song, and culture to tackle a crisis generally communicated in the stilted jargon of climate science and diplomacy — a life or death matter that often gets lost in abstruse discussions about loss and damage, mitigation, adaptation, and de-risking.

But what sets Mottley apart from other charismatic climate firebrands is her nerdy grasp of opaque international financial instruments. She comes to the table with a battery of painstakingly fashioned investment proposals to solve thorny climate problems, while striving to radically overhaul the international financial system that has dominated world affairs since World War II.

Mottley’s environmental advocacy has catapulted the leader of a tiny island nation of about 300,000 people into a global force on climate change. And she does so as governments look increasingly unlikely to meet the target they set in the Paris Agreement of limiting the earth’s rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030. Failure will almost certainly lead to more menacing floods, storms, and droughts.

Her bold oratory has also broken her into the conversation among United Nations diplomats about who might emerge as potential candidates for U.N. secretary-general in 2026. Her name has eclipsed other potential contenders like Costa Rican Rebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, and Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean president and U.N. human rights high commissioner, whose prospects for the top U.N. job have been tangled by the power struggle between China and the United States.

“People are talking about [Mottley] as the first female secretary-general. Who knows? She’s probably too much of a free spirit and independent to ever get the job. But she’s in the conversation,” said one U.N.-based diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk publicly.

The 57-year-old Mottley has been in demand. In the run-up to the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 27, in Egypt, she has been omnipresent on the conference scene, headlining international conferences, fundraising events, and making an appearance at  an event hosted by Global Citizen along with Bill Nye The Science Guy. Time Magazine also included her on a list of the world’s 100 most influential people, alongside presidents Joseph Biden, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky.

Beneath the adulation is a calculated recognition among political leaders that Mottley has reached such heights of celebrity that it pays simply to be seen with her, even if you don’t subscribe to her world vision. At last year’s climate summit in Glasgow, for instance, U.S. President Joe Biden opposed proposals backed by Mottley to hold high-income countries liable for the destruction caused by extreme weather, but held her hand as they walked together, sparking a much-photographed moment. 

“I think it’s the halo effect,” said Natalie Samarasinghe, Open Society Foundations’ global director of advocacy. “She’s a superstar and people want to get the photo op, but they don’t want more than the photo op.”

Mottley declined a request to be interviewed for this piece.

‘We are in a life-or-death struggle’

Mottley will make her appearance at the summit — which opens on Sunday at Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh — at a time of crisis.

The world is nowhere near meeting the 2030 target to cap greenhouse emissions set by 193 governments in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Without dramatic reductions, the world’s temperature is forecast to climb to about 2.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, well above the level that can bring catastrophic weather events.

“We are in a life-or-death struggle for our own safety and our survival,” U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres recently warned reporters. He noted that pledges from industrialized powers to help lessen the blow on more low-income countries — that bear the least responsibility for global warming — are “coming far too little, and far too late.”

“Current pledges and policies are shutting the door on our chance to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, let alone meet the 1.5-degree goal,” he said.

Mahmoud Mohieldin, the U.N. high-level climate change champion for Egypt, said that this year’s climate summit will focus on the implementation of agreements reached at previous high-level summits in 2009 in Copenhagen, and in 2015 in Paris.

“It’s all about finance,” he told Devex during the 77th U.N. General Assembly. “If you’re interested to participate in Sharm, you are more than welcome,” he added. “But you will be even more welcome if you’re coming not just with pledges and promises, you’re coming with finance, investments and action.”

Mottley, who will co-chair a round table meeting on climate finance with French President Emmanuel Macron, hopes to convince high-income countries that it’s in their national interests to write massive checks to low- and middle-income countries struggling with the impact.

The effort will likely require some public shaming, a skill she excels at, and some reminders of what industrialized powers have promised but not delivered.

At the landmark Copenhagen summit, high-income nations pledged $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poorer countries. They have fallen short. In 2020, industrial powers gave nearly $17 billion less, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

And only 26 of 193 countries met their commitment from Glasgow’s summit to put forward concrete plans, known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, to curb emissions.

Mottley and other advocates say the targets are woefully inadequate.

Even if high-income countries abide by the $100 billion promise — the United Kingdom concluded last year that governments were three years behind schedule — it would represent only a fraction of the trillions of dollars in public and private financing needed to stall the earth’s warming.

The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, has amassed about $2 trillion in windfall profits this year, according to the International Energy Agency.

In an address to the Summit of Americas in Los Angeles, Mottley said island states are trapped in a vicious cycle of indebtedness, rising borrowing costs, and inaccessibility to green technology, which have undermined their ability to confront global warming.

An apostle of Bob

Mottley, who hails from a prominent political dynasty, has been a dominant force in Barbadian politics for decades, leading the Labour Party since 2008.

She became the first woman prime minister in 2018, and orchestrated the country’s final break with British colonialism, abolishing its constitutional monarchy last year and removing Queen Elizabeth as head of state. In January, she won a landslide victory for reelection, gaining more than 70% of the popular vote and securing all of parliament’s house seats.

Mottley captured the attention of world leaders at the climate summit last year. In a blistering address to an audience that included President Biden and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, she delivered a stirring speech that warned increasing temperatures constitute a “dreaded death sentence” for island nations from Antigua and Barbuda to Fiji and the Maldives.

She has leveraged her popularity, a granular understanding of international finance, and an extraordinary ability to distill complex economic issues into plain language to clinch a series of blue ribbon appointments on international institutions.

She has also harnessed the power of song, weaving the lyrics of iconic Caribbean singers, including Marley and Jamaican reggae and ska star, Jimmy Cliff, into her appeals for international solidarity in the fight for global equality. Last November, Mottley awarded the Barbadian pop star Rihanna the designation of National Hero of Barbados.

She opened her address to world leaders at the Summit of the Americas with several passages from Marley, repeating over and over again: “There is so much trouble in the world.”

“I’ve chosen the language of Bob Marley this morning, not because I’m an apostle of Bob, as you’ve probably realized by now, but also because he reminds us of the day-to-day reality of our people and our citizens,” she told the gathering.

Mottley, who also holds the dual post of minister of finance economic affairs and investment, has served as co-chair of the development committee of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. She is also co-chair of the World Health Organization’s global leaders group on antimicrobial resistance. Guterres also tapped her as co-chair, along with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, of his Sustainable Development Goals Advocacy Group.

“These are platforms where powerful new voices which put themselves in the center of an argument which has salience and momentum, can shoot to early stardom,” said Open Society President Mark Malloch-Brown, a former U.K. minister and deputy U.N. secretary-general.
        

“She is so knowledgeable on the breadth of issues,” Sally Yozell, director of the Environmental Security program at the Stimson Center, told Devex. “She’s really been able to tell the compelling story that knits all of these different issues from finance to climate to debt to justice to real people issues, not some amorphous ideas.”

Bracing for an ‘ugly fight’

But Mottley’s ambitions go beyond climate.

She advocates a reinvention of the financial system birthed in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, at the end of World War II, arguing that donors and banks should prioritize the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and help countries most hurt by global warming absorb the shocks.

Many of her proposals have been codified in the Bridgetown Agenda, named after the capital of Barbados, which proposes a range of initiatives to pump money into struggling countries, expand multilateral lending by $1 trillion, and make it easier for countries to gain access to concessionary loans.

She has expressed particular frustration with the lack of low- and middle-income country representation in the most powerful intergovernmental bodies — the Group of Seven leading industrial nations and the Group of 20 major economies — that set the rules on international finance. She says they ignore repeated calls for the people of Africa and African descent to have a seat at the decision-making table.

“How can a world have at its core a subcommittee that excludes more than 1.4, 1.5 billion people … and expect it to reflect fairness and transparency,” Mottley said in her September address to the U.N. General Assembly.

Among Bridgetown’s proposals is for debt issuers to enable countries hit by a catastrophic storm or pandemic to delay loan repayments. She has also called on wealthy donors and development banks to inject large sums into struggling countries to help them through a debt crisis that has been exacerbated by a strong U.S. dollar, tightening monetary policy, and soaring inflation.

Mottley has also pushed back on the notion that the cost of responding to natural disasters wrought by climate change is beyond the means of the world’s governments. If they can put up $25 trillion since the 2008 financial meltdown, and the ensuing pandemic, they can help finance energy transition, she argues.

The most contentious issue is loss and damage, which refers to the financial obligation of polluters to pay the cost of destruction wrought by climate.

At next week’s COP, Mottley plans to prod high-income nations to accept financial responsibility for rebuilding the most climate-vulnerable countries through a so-called loss and damage fund, and a tax on fossil fuel companies, according to Avinash Persaud, a former investment analyst who serves as special envoy to Mottley on investment and financial services. But “we don’t go into COP with high expectations,” he said.

She has received some powerful backing from Guterres, who also favors a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies that have been “feasting on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies” to pay for loss and damage and offset costs of rising food and energy costs. He believes action on loss and damage “is a moral imperative that cannot be ignored.”

But the initiative has proven controversial among lenders and some donors, who worry about the financial cost to bail out countries that have irresponsibly taken on debt they can’t afford and that the demands for money would be unending.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has indicated loss and damage is a political non-starter.

Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, put it bluntly at an event sponsored by the New York Times in September: “You tell me the government in the world that has trillions of dollars, because that’s what it costs.”

There’s real potential for stalemate at the summit. 

“It’s going to be an ugly fight,” said Samarasinghe, noting that the north and south have dug into clashing positions. “This has been cast as the make-or-break issue for developing countries but we’re not there.”

Although the loss and damage concept has been discussed for decades, the proliferation of extreme weather events, from wildfires in the U.S. to massive flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria, has brought the matter to the forefront.

Industrialized countries are bracing for confrontation over the issue and seeking a diplomatic exit that limits their financial liability. In September, Denmark became the first country to commit to compensating climate-vulnerable states by pledging over $13 million.

The G-7 has a plan that would make it easier for vulnerable nations to purchase insurance and secure loans following destructive weather events. Donors are expected to make pledges in Egypt, according to an independent researcher close to the negotiations.

But Mottley and her team don't feel it goes far enough. Loss and damage should come from grants, and not plunge heavily indebted countries into an even worse debt crisis, according to Persaud.

“Climate doesn’t affect everyone in the same way,”’ Persaud said, adding that Barbados intends to deliver a stern message at COP 27 about the unfairness of the international response to global warming. “We will be stark about the fact that 40% of the world is burning and drowning and those with the greatest capacity to do something are not doing something because they are not burning and drowning.”

Part of the sales windfall-tax pitch involves convincing big powers that they are not being asked to pay reparations for more than 200 years of industrialization. “I don’t think reparations is an illegitimate ask. It’s just not going to lead us to reach any settlements,” Persaud said.  

The initiative has received a chilly response from some donor capitals.

Kerry recognizes the need to ramp up investment in the trillions of dollars, particularly by spurring private investment in green technologies, but he says the priority needs to be on what’s doable, not on demanding governments to accept liability for current climate disasters.

“Let’s be serious about this,” Kerry told the New York Times. “Where’s the money coming from? … You think this Republican Congress, where we couldn’t get one vote for this legislation, is gonna step up and do loss and damage? Good luck. So I’m in the zone of reality. If we don’t lower our emissions we’re croaked.”  

Mottley’s potential impact on the outcome of the climate summit remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, she has revived the ghost of Bob Marley at the center of the debate on global fairness. Following her address to the Summit of Americas in Los Angeles, the event’s moderator, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, concluded with this line from the late Jamaican singer’s repertoire: “In the words of Bob, no woman, no cry, don’t shed no tears. Let’s act. We can sing a redemption song together.”

Shabtai Gold contributed reporting.