The COVID-19 crisis has shown that the transition to a greener and fairer economy is both possible and urgent. The government now needs to establish clear rules and support mechanisms for the inevitable victims to finally accelerate the movement.
The pandemic has given rise to the development of vaccines in record time as well as the deployment, by governments, of financial aid policies equivalent, in rich countries, to more than a quarter of their gross domestic product, recalled Monday the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, at the kick-off of the 27e edition of the Montreal Conference. “It’s a remarkable achievement” which largely explains the equally impressive rebound in the economy in recent months, she was careful to stress. The threat posed by COVID-19 and its variants has not yet been ruled out, however. And this success hides “a dangerous divergence” between the fate of the richest and the poorest countries.
In fact, unlike the previous financial crisis which prompted governments to create a new multilateral forum (the G20) to coordinate their struggle, the current crisis has instead given rise to “an aggregation of individual measures” whose scope has increased. depended on the means available to each country, noted a few minutes later the Director General of the International Labor Organization, Guy Ryder. “We threw a lot of money into the problem without paying much attention to the issues of consistency and decency. The danger is that the same will happen with the fight against climate change. “
It is that governments have a decisive role to play in the transition that everyone hopes towards a greener and more sustainable economy, hammered several speakers, most of whom spoke remotely through videoconferencing. We even wait long after them. “There is no longer any real debate about the need to make this transition. The question today is more that of the means that must be deployed to achieve this, ”observed Odile Renaud-Basso, President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Everyone agrees, for example, that carbon pricing is a particularly effective way to use market mechanisms to incentivize greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, but political leaders are the only ones who can make it happen. put in place as well as being able to compensate for its harmful impacts on the most vulnerable in society.
Make no mistake, the transition to carbon neutrality for 2050 “will bring winners and losers,” said Leslie Maasdorp, vice-president and chief financial officer at the new Development Bank set up a few years ago. years by the main emerging powers. “The good thing is that this target forces everyone to think longer term. Now let’s hope that we will know how to coordinate better than during COVID. “
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Achieving neutrality will be expensive, but cheaper than postponing it again, noted Odile Renaud-Basso.
It is estimated, among other things, that global energy investments will have to increase as quickly as possible from US $ 2 trillion to US $ 4 trillion or trillion per year, explained former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney. , now responsible for sustainable development at the investment firm Brookfield Asset Management. Governments will never be able to provide such sums, he says, especially after the financial effort they made during the last financial crisis. “This money will have to come largely from the private sector. “
However, increasingly aware of the inevitability of the transition to a more sustainable economy, economic and financial players have redoubled their efforts to prepare for it despite the health crisis. “What they need now is for governments to put in place frameworks that send the right, credible and predictable signals,” such as carbon pricing and the planned end of internal combustion engine cars.
Organized by the Forum of the Americas, the Montreal Conference is placed this year under the great theme of the path “towards a greener and fairer economy” and will be held until Thursday in “hybrid format”, notably live from the Hotel. Bonaventure.
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