Define climate leadership by example—7 actions for the G7

When the G7 meet, each year, there is hunger to see exemplary acts of leadership, in the hopes that conditions can be improved around the world, as a result. What we need now is leadership by example in all of the areas that add up to global polycrisis, starting with short, medium, and long-range commitments to address and collectively overcome climate breakdown. 

That’s easy to say, so what does it look like to exemplify climate leadership and provide a signal that we might emerge from the polycrisis? 

1. First, we need greater everyday action to manifest, protect, and expand climate value—reduce risk, build resilience, transition industries to clean practices, and make sure finance and trade help actors large and small, rich and poor, be part of the building of climate value, at home and around the world.
2. That will mean enhancing alignment of pricing measures and regulations, setting trade standards, and providing incentives for both nations and industries to compete inside that better marketplace.
3. Data systems will be critical in all areas—linking Earth science platforms into financial data flows, supporting advanced green labeling, including for the downscaling of capital flows to vulnerable and marginal communities, to support better outcomes for people and for the planet.
4. A critical application of integrated data systems is early warning capacity, which can save lives, protect infrastructure and investment, and prevent multi-generational debt burdens from halting development.
5. Nature and biodiversity are foundational to human health and wellbeing. The G7 can set standards that reward banks and financial institutions for prioritizing support to business practices that restore nature and protect biodiversity.
6. All of the above are necessary to secure food supplies now and into the future. Aligning food systems finance, production and distribution methods, and consumer food sovereignty (access, affordability, labeling, and transparency) with planetary health goals can support better health outcomes, everyday background human development, macroeconomic stability and resilience, and decent and enduring livelihoods for agricultural communities.
7. Participatory civics needs to be a priority, not only inside of already democratic countries, but across the world. The G7 can leverage their resources in all areas to invite trading partners, and other allies and rivals, to provide more structural freedom and redress to their people, so the opportunities for corruption, impunity, menacing of activists, and greenwashing, are reduced.

Climate value is the web of benefits of a healthy climate, nature, and related human activities that support better outcomes for everyone. Climate breakdown is the unraveling of systemic benefits from nature, society, and wider economic supports. We need a world order that favors contributions—at planetary scale, midscale, and in our most local endeavors—that support everyone’s easier access to climate value benefits, and related security and prosperity.

Cascade effects need attention. Pollution, desertification, water scarcity, and local armed conflict, are leading to land grabs, ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, and political destabilization in affected countries. Upstream action that reduces these risks is urgently needed; finance should be structured to align with that goal everywhere possible. Our 7 recommendations all provide ways of intervening to slow, reverse, and ultimately to prevent cascade effects linked to climate breakdown. 

Having just hosted our first Interparliamentary Climate Value Exchange, in Washington, DC, and noting widespread frustration with lack of material progress in UN Climate Change negotiations, we would like to recognize the call for a fossil free future, issued by parliamentarians from Africa, Asia, Europe, North, America, South America, Australia, and the wider Pacific region. 

The Parliamentarians for a Fossil Free Future note that: 

“The G7 countries, as major economies and significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, have a unique responsibility and capacity to lead the way in the fight against climate change.”

They also call for halting public financing of fossil fuels, enacting policies that support the phase out of private financing of fossil fuels, and supporting a just and equitable transition, so countries that have polluted less historically are not deprived of resources to build their best possible future. 

The call includes recognition that climate finance needs to scale up quickly, and that it “should cover mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and just transition.” At Citizens’ Climate International, we recognize that climate finance also needs to follow a Capital to Communities model, where stakeholders have an active role throughout the life of transformational interventions.

Recognizing the need for a detailed, integrated and holistic approach to reducing the ripple effects of climate breakdown and spreading sustainable prosperity, we have created a resource library with additional information under each of the seven areas of leadership called for above. 

We emphasize in the resources shared below the critical points of convergence between human activity, ingenuity, and wellbeing, and the health and wellbeing of natural systems. The operational paradigm we wish to advance is an intentional, institutional, and systemic attention to strategies that avoid climate breakdown by building climate value.