The world needs a “new Bretton Woods summit” to realign the worldwide economic climate with climate action, outgoing UN official Rachel Kyte has stated.
Kyte, who steps down this week as chief of Sustainable Energy for those (SE4All) and the head from the UN’s push to bring clean energy towards the world’s poor, was speaking in a panel event organised by Climate Home News around the sidelines from the UN general assembly in New York.
She warned current “mid-level bureaucratic discussions” were not enough to align financial institutions using the Paris Agreement goals, adding that it was “utterly insane” that the flow of finance to help the the third world deal with global warming was just “a bit bigger” than before the 2023 accord.
“There has to be a brand new Bretton Woods summit”, organised by UN secretary general António Guterres, with leaders from China, the EU and the US around the table to reshape multilateralism and align all public investments with climate action, she told the crowd in Ny.
The original 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire laid the principles for a lot of today's global economic order. It also led to the development of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. (Kyte is really a former v . p . of the latter). The system was designed to hold in check the trade conflict and rising nationalism that contributed to the outbreak of World War II.
But those dynamics are resurgent. National interests, domestic politics and also the trade war between China and the US have dampened momentum for climate action at any given time rising emissions require an acceleration.
On Monday in a UN climate action summit, the earth's largest emitters failed to answer Guterres' call for plans on how to decarbonise their economies to net zero emissions by 2050.
“If our multilateral structures are failing us plus they don't reform,” said Sharan Burrow, general secretary from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), who had been also around the panel, “then we are going to have to re-create a few of the basis which the planet does business.”
She said president Emmanuel Macron of France was one of the few world leaders attempting to address this issue. Germany and France launched an ‘alliance for multilateralism’ only at that week’s UN general assembly.
UN ambassador for Belize and chair of the alliance of small island states Lois Young, said climate finance was “in an abysmal state,” and required “a transformation” from the financial system. While Farhana Yamin, veteran climate lawyer and Extinction Rebellion activist, warned of “the breakdown of that entire system on which we can confidently depend on evidence-based policy”.
In a report published on Wednesday, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) called for giving governments more power to tackle the climate crisis by reorienting the monetary system toward a “global Green New Deal”.
Speaking to CHN in front of the UN summit, Kyte said faster finance, new institutions and a more inclusive conversation about the future were required to close the ambition gap.
“The sense of urgency and the use of sustained, concentrated attention isn't there everywhere. We want a brand new generation of institutions,” she said.
Besides the requirement for reform from the economic order, Kyte also warned that gas and oil companies were holding back efforts to create clean energy to the poorest people on the planet.
SE4All's latest tracking report showed the planet was off the pace for 2030 sustainable development goals to roll out clean electricity and cooking everywhere.
If energy planning decisions are based on dialogue between governments and incumbent – fossil fuel – energy companies, “it won't get us where you want to go,” she said.
On the fringe of the UN climate action summit on Monday, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, the industry's response to climate action which includes 13 from the world's largest oil and gas companies, put down their vision of a future with fossil fuels.
Kyte said the industry came to the summit “to be viewed in dialogue” with the youth and those calling for ambition. “They cannot even invest in not spending anything lobbying for the other part. This is an action summit.” she said.
Research through the think-tank Influence Map found that ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total spent a lot more than $1 billion of shareholder funds on lobbying and spreading misleading details about global warming within the 3 years following a 2023 Paris deal.
After nearly four years leading SE4All, Kyte is set to become the very first female dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, US.
While championing radical change, Kyte speaks from personal experience about the importance of making the transition work with households and communities.
During the UK miners' strikes in the 1980s, her father was an electric engineer, called to fix pylons after a storm – sometimes having to cross picket lines to make critical infrastructure safe. In the wave of one's sector privatisation that followed, he is made redundant.
“The industry was reformed inside a fairly callous way,” she told CHN. “You don't forget what that felt like.”
Her move into academia is partly to flee the relentless jetlag of UN diplomacy and hang out with her wife and 2 children. Simultaneously, she'd been surfing for the way to work with generation x.
“I am very inspired by the climate movement, but there's a quality to the young people's approach to the world that is extremely inspiring.”
