With Trump, Smaller Nations Push for Climate Progress—Without the U.S.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley has become a leading champion of small economies in global climate discussions. And so I took note at last year’s United Nations climate conference when she said she thought countries should engage then-President elect Trump to try to explain the importance of climate work.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“I am not one of those who will come out and say immediately that with the election of President Trump all is gloom and doom,” she said at a fireside chat last November. “We need to find mechanisms… to have the conversations.”
Mottley’s position has evolved since then. Trump entered office in January with an aggressive agenda to attack clean energy and end collaboration on climate change. Last week, as delegates from around the world gathered in Barbados for a sustainable energy conference, Mottley instead insisted that small countries would need to find their own way forward. “You don’t spend time or energy praying over what could have been,” she said. “But we deal with the world as it is.”
Across three days of talks at the SEforAll Global Forum in Barbados, Trump barely came up explicitly. It’s not that anyone there underestimated the consequences of his election for global climate progress. Rather, his election has finally sunk in, and attention has turned to paving a path forward—without the U.S.
It’s a telling glimpse at how climate discussions may be shifting. The gravitational pull of the U.S. should not be dismissed; some countries will inevitably follow his lead. Nonetheless, if the conversations in Barbados provide any indication, many emerging and developing economies remain eager to forge their own clean energy path.
The U.S. shadow has always loomed large over international climate collaboration. As the world’s largest economy and only superpower, climate negotiators had to adjust language carefully to respond to the U.S. political context.
With the Paris Agreement in place, conversations have largely focused on finance—getting money flowing to energy transition projects, particularly in developing and emerging economies. But despite the central role the U.S. played in setting up the system, U.S. public money never came to represent the lifeblood of international climate finance—even as developing countries and climate advocates insisted that the country owed it to the rest of the world to pay up because of its historical emissions. Even in the climate-friendly Biden Administration, it took significant wrangling for the White House to commit to $11 billion in annual international climate finance. To put that in perspective, developing countries left last year’s U.N. climate talks disappointed that their wealthier counterparts committed only to a total $300 billion in annual climate finance.
In other words, on the finance front, the U.S. isn’t leaving that big of a gap to fill. So where will the money come from? One key area under discussion at the SEforAll forum, where I spoke with officials in the public and private sectors based everywhere from Fiji to Sierra Leone, was so-called south-south collaboration. Instead of looking to the U.S. and Europe to pony up capital, developing and emerging market countries can work together—providing the goods and finance without the help of their wealthier counterparts.
According to research from the Brookings Institution, trade between Global South countries recently surpassed trade between Global North countries. “This is a great signal of progress,” Arancha González, a former foreign minister of Spain who is now the dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, told me on a panel I moderated at the forum. “It tells us that there is a new world out there.”
Potential sources of finance include development banks located in large emerging economies like Brazil and South Africa. Institutions like the New Development Bank, formed in 2014 by the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, have financed billions in clean energy development. And, of course, it’s impossible to talk about this financial picture without talking about China. The country’s Belt and Road Initiative has been a source of more than $1 trillion in capital for infrastructure since its inception in 2013. In recent years, the country has increasingly focused its funding on green projects.
Many developing countries have also focused on raising capital locally to fund projects—pushing savings and pension fund money to invest in the local market rather than looking abroad for higher returns.
And then there are the new methods of what is often called blended finance. Traditionally, the term refers to a combination of public and private capital where the public money lowers the risk for private investors. More recently, philanthropy has entered the blended finance conversation, playing an increasingly important role providing money
“We have what we call strange bedfellows, where… institutional investors are partnering with a philanthropic organization, and together coming up with a blended finance solution that is innovative in approach,” says Ije Ikoku Okeke, who runs catalytic climate capital for the Global South at RMI, a clean energy non-profit.
A right-wing populist might not object to this new dynamic. In such a world view, American money should support Americans—leaving other countries to their own devices. But is the U.S. really better off if the rest of the world builds a coalition with Americans on the sidelines?
Putting U.S. strategic interests aside, it is a little refreshing to hear a conversation about clean energy in the Global South that doesn’t get bogged down in whether the U.S. is going to live up to its moral responsibility as the world’s biggest historic emitter and instead focuses on solutions.
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