It was supposed to be a watershed moment. On Thursday and Friday, heads of state and finance ministers from across the world were summoned by Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, to the Palais Brongniart, a neoclassical slab built at Napoleon’s behest to house Paris’s stock exchange. The goal was to determine a way to pay for climate change. At first, the talk was promising. Economists and campaigners have for decades wrangled reluctant ministers into agreeing on the amount of cash necessary to get the developing world to reduce emissions and climate-proof their economies. So they were rubbing their hands with glee as Mr Macron, along with Janet Yellen, America’s treasury secretary, and 50 leaders from the developing world, agreed that the problem had a price tag of trillions of dollars, rather than undercooked estimates in the hundreds of billions.

But rich countries were unwilling to do much more than talk. One indicator was that, though plenty of top officials showed up from Africa and Asia to demand cash, few of a similar standing showed up from the countries that are supposed to be paying, other than Mr Macron and Ms Yellen. Britain sent Andrew Mitchell, the long-suffering minister for development; Italy sent a junior minister. Representatives from Germany and China only arrived for dinner after Thursday’s main affair.  

The actual commitments were small. Mr Macron and Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, declared the next stage of one of their pet diplomatic projects, first announced two years ago. The plan involves recycling $100bn of rich countries’ special drawing rights, a basket of currencies that the IMF allocates to every country to keep on its central bank balance sheet, and the closest thing to a global magic money tree, into various lending funds. An unspecified portion will become climate finance but a fifth of the total currently has no public donor. 

Other ideas fiddled with the structures of development agencies, which have been tasked with co-ordinating climate finance on top of alleviating poverty. The World Bank could take more risks and increase its debt-to-equity ratio. Ajay Banga, its president, announced more loans with clauses that pause borrowers’ repayments if they are hit by a natural disaster. Mr Banga optimistically also tasked a new group of academics and luminaries, including Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, with directing trillions of dollars of private-sector finance, something on which international policymakers have a lacklustre record. 

One bigger idea, a global shipping tax, faces years of political delays through trade ministries and the International Maritime Organisation. Others, such as a global carbon tax or one specific to fossil fuels, or even a new climate bank, have been waylaid by rich countries’ politics. 

The promises made at the conference are a drop in the ocean. By 2030 developing countries need to be spending $2.4trn a year on adaptation and mitigation, according to the Grantham Institute, a think-tank at the London School of Economics. And it thinks that at least $1trn of that must come from rich countries and investors. According to Ms Yellen, all the summit’s ideas put together would squeeze between $50bn and $200bn from development agencies. Much of that will be slow to come, if it arrives at all. As one attendee said at the end of the conference, “our expectations were low [...] they have been met.”

Thanks for reading this edition of the Climate Issue. If you have any feedback, you can reach us here: [email protected].