Photo credits lovelyday12 from Getty Images

More than 40 world leaders attended a two-day summit in Paris, discussing how to overhaul the global financial architecture and address the needs of the Global South to tackle poverty and help fighting the climate emergency.

The Summit for a New Global Financing Pact officially aimed to build ‘a more responsive, fairer and more inclusive international financial system to fight inequalities, finance the climate transition, and bring us closer to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals’.

For a good analysis of the challenges and ambitions of the international climate finance debate, read this article by Phenomenal World.

In the run-up to the Summit, several think tanks and stakeholders published their views on the reforms to the international financial architecture that are needed in order to tackle poverty and climate divisions between developed and developing countries.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) issued an excellent paper ‘Seven Ways to Reform the Global Financial System to Help Achieve SDGs’. A special letter to Global North leaders was signed by more than 150 progressive economists and policy experts, demanding the redirection of trillions of dollars away from drivers of the climate and inequality emergencies: the fossil fuel industry, ‘unfair colonial debts’ and the super-rich 1%.

The Stockholm Environment Institute, however, considers talks about climate finance to be a distraction ‘from a more pressing need: project financing’.

Here are some of the media reports evaluating the summit’s outcomes: