Emmanuel Macron pleads in favor of a “financial shock” to help emerging countries succeed in their ecological transition

Bringing the “at the same time” to a global level. This seems to be the desire of Emmanuel Macron, who wishes to “accelerate at the same time in terms of ecological transition and the fight against poverty”, by detailing the “seven pillars” of his “doctrine” in a forum in the daily newspaper Le Monde published Friday. The Head of State once again pleaded to “create the conditions for a financial shock” to help emerging countries implement “unorthodox budgetary and monetary” policies.

It also calls for reforming the governance of the Bretton Woods system – agreements that redefined the rules of global finance in 1944 – “starting with the World Bank and the IMF”. “Eighty years after its creation, this financial architecture is undersized compared to the size of the economy and the world population,” explains Emmanuel Macron. And to add that it is also “largely fragmented, because we have not opened the door to emerging and developing countries in governance” within these institutions.

“We need to mobilize, beyond public funding, new private insurance mechanisms in the face of climate risk,” he believes, announcing for the first half of 2024 “a first package for adaptation to climate change and losses and damages” in Bangladesh of one billion euros invested by the French Development Agency.

France and Kazakhstan will also organize “in September 2024” a “One Planet summit on the sidelines of the next United Nations General Assembly” on the specific subject of access to water and its “governance mechanisms to on a global scale,” he says. Two days before his traditional greetings to the French, the Head of State is once again taking a step aside in the hope of putting an end to the controversy and the political crisis born from his law on immigration, by insisting on the one of his favorite subjects: the implementation of the Paris climate agreement.

A “non-negotiable” objective, he recalls in his column, “the most advanced countries, which are also those which have emitted the most CO2 since the industrial revolution, must abandon fossil fuels”. He calls for helping emerging countries in their transition, by “accelerating the financing of renewable energies but also of nuclear energy, the role of which is key”.

Also read: Is Emmanuel Macron targeted by France's condemnation for climate inaction?

Concerning the preservation of biodiversity, the third United Nations conference on the ocean will be held in Nice in June 2025, a joint initiative of France and Costa Rica. More recent element of its “doctrine”: financing the preservation of forests abroad. Three partnerships, for a total amount of more than 200 million euros, were announced by Emmanuel Macron at COP28 to protect the tropical forests of Papua New Guinea, Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which store CO2. These agreements mention “carbon and biodiversity credits”, without details, while the social and environmental benefits of these tools are regularly called into question.

In his column, the president calls for “an in-depth reform of the voluntary market for the exchange of carbon credits” which currently allow companies to offset their emissions to achieve their neutrality objectives. He also calls for the creation of an “International Carbon and Biodiversity Stock Exchange” with “sufficiently ambitious criteria to avoid greenwashing”, in which “public actors” could participate in the same way as companies. However, COP28 failed to create an international mechanism supervised by the UN, provided for by the Paris agreement, to regulate carbon credits. The road is still long...