Barbados PM Mia Mottley calls for ‘absolute transformation’ as she fights to make Paris climate summit matter

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday opened the two-day climate summit in Paris with a rousing call to overhaul the banking and aid system that has kept developing countries from rising out of poverty or from building environmental resilience.

“Policymakers and countries shouldn’t ever have to choose between reducing poverty and protecting the planet,” he said, calling for a “public finance shock” to find funding to fight these challenges.

Mr Macron’s language was suitably stirring for an event that aims to hammer out principles for a New Global Financial Pact to help poor countries access vital climate and development funding.

However, while Mr Macron is the host, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is the key player at the summit. In recent years, she has risen to become one of the most vocal advocates on the world stage for responsible planetary stewardship, arguing eloquently that the key lies in reforming the global financial architecture built in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Related Article

“What is required of us now is absolute transformation and not reform of our institutions,” Ms Mottley told the Paris meeting. “We come to Paris to identify the common humanity that we share and the absolute moral imperative to save our planet and to make it liveable.”

Ms Mottley, 57, has led the Barbados government since 2018, with her Labour Party increasing its majority in the 2022 elections. Earlier this year, she unveiled a detailed proposal on how to fix the global financial system to help developing countries invest in clean energy and boost resilience to climate impacts.

Her plan, which has the backing of Mr Macron and key Western leaders, calls for an overhaul of the so-called Bretton Woods institutions set up in the Cold War: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and, later, the World Trade Organisation. She argues that these organisations still reflect the political and economic power dynamics of that time – even though more than three-quarters of today’s countries were not present at the time of their creation.

Ms Mottley, the Caribbean nation’s first female premier, has long spoken out about the inequities of global wealth and power, reflected in the way UN climate change negotiations are thrashed out with little consideration for the poorest nations.

At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, she berated rich nations for failing to curb the catastrophic effects of climate change sooner and faster. As former chair of the World Bank and the IMF’s Development Committee, she has argued that a country’s per capita income is not always the best measure of its wealth.

The challenge is huge. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said more than 50 nations were now in or near debt default – many of which are also particularly vulnerable to climate impacts – while many African countries are now spending more on debt repayments than on healthcare.

But Ms Mottley has already generated widespread support for the Bridgetown Initiative, her plan launched in the Barbados capital last year to provide liquidity support, debt restructuring, $100bn a year in private capital, and an extra $100bn a year in development loans.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the summit that Washington would use the moment to push for creditors to grant relief and restructure the debts of developing countries. And the World Bank announced plans for “pause clauses” for countries hit by disasters.

Ms Mottley warned that the world was “running out of time” to help poor countries prepare for the climate crisis, and is leading the fight to find solutions.