G7 (Group of Seven)

As the annual Group of Seven (G7) Summit ended this week, world leaders issued a declaration to address some of the world’s most pressing issues. Prominently featured in this document is a call to promote women’s economic empowerment and entrepreneurship, described as a “key driver of innovation, growth, and jobs.” In a separate annex, the G7 leaders endorsed specific steps to promote women’s entrepreneurship, including facilitating access to finance, improving work-family policies for men and women, encouraging girls’ participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines, and championing successful female entrepreneurs as role models for the next generation. This is not the first time that women’s empowerment has been prioritized in a G7 declaration. In fact, it’s part of a recent trend in which gender issues have been elevated by world leaders in international fora and integrated into mainstream policy discussions. Consider, for example, Canada’s leadership of the Group of Eight (G8) in June 2010, which gave rise to the Muskoka Initiative on maternal and child health and led to a commitment to invest in national health systems. The foreign ministers of the G8 have also highlighted the role of women in peace and security. In 2012, the ministers called for implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security. A year later, the same group endorsed a declaration on preventing sexual violence in conflict. Gender equality has been a focus of the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit as well.  In November 2014, each G20 country set a historic commitment to reduce the gap between the share of men and women in their workforce by 25 percent by 2025. The G20 commitment to increase women’s labor force participation was echoed at the Kruen summit this week in the G7 declaration that emerged. It was also augmented by a new agreement to increase women’s vocational training in the developing world by one-third by 2030. German Chancellor Angela Merkel highlighted the relationship between gender equality and economic progress in her closing remarks, noting that barriers to women persist everywhere in the world—“not only in the developing countries where a lot of work still needs to be done,” but also “in industrialized countries.” She promised to convene a conference in September to address the “structural differences between men and women” that remain. Research from major international economic institutions supports this focus on gender equality by world leaders. Over the past two decades, analyses from the International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and World Bank have demonstrated the growth potential of increasing women’s labor force participation. The Bank is in the process of revamping its gender strategy, and mainstreaming the discussion of women’s economic empowerment is a core piece of its new concept note. Recent international commitments to advance gender equality are undoubtedly a critical step forward—but the real test of progress for women will lie in their implementation. To ensure gains for women and girls—and for the health of entire communities and economies—such declarations must be coupled with a push to implement the policies they prescribe.

The G7 leaders concluded their annual summit yesterday with a declaration that put climate change front and center. As with all G7 communiqués, most of the content reaffirms steps that the leaders have already promised to take and, in many cases, are already taking. But, as usual, there are some interesting wrinkles. I’m struck in particular the parts that seem to be the most important are different from those that have generated the most headlines. Here are a couple highlights in each category. Interesting and Overlooked   “[A Paris] agreement should enhance transparency and accountability including through binding rules at its core to track progress towards achieving targets…. This should enable all countries to follow a low-carbon and resilient development pathway….”   The United States has long pressed for a shift away from binding emissions reduction commitments and toward a mix of nationally grounded emission-cutting efforts and binding international commitments to transparency and verification. European countries have often taken the other side, emphasizing the importance of binding targets (or at least policies) for cutting emissions. Now it looks like the big developed countries are on the same page as the United States. The language above is all about binding countries to transparency – and there isn’t anything elsewhere in the communiqué about binding them to actual emissions goals. This doesn’t guarantee a smooth landing in Paris – China, India, and others will resist some of the binding transparency and accountability measures that the G7 leaders want – but at least the big developed countries appear to be forming a fairly united front.   “We will intensify our support particularly for vulnerable countries own efforts to manage climate change related disaster risk and to build resilience. We will aim to increase by up to 400 million the number of people in the most vulnerable developing countries who have access to direct or indirect insurance coverage against the negative impact of climate change related hazards by 2020 and support the development of early warning systems in the most vulnerable countries.”   This is the most substantive portion of the climate part of the communiqué. It reflects an increasing focus on adaptation in general and on insurance in particular. Existing institutions – notably the World Bank – are decently positioned to deliver on these goals (though meeting them by 2020 will be challenging). Indeed this part of the communiqué is unusually straightforward, and therefore well suited to clear follow-through. The mushiest bit is the undefined “climate change related hazards”. Ideally G7 countries would help vulnerable populations get access to insurance against extreme weather hazards of all origins – whether or not those are generated by climate change – and, in practice, that’s presumably what insurance would do. Headline Grabbing But Less Than Meets the Eye   “We emphasize the deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonization of the global economy over the source of this century…. As a common vision for a global goal of greenhouse gas emissions reductions we support sharing with all parties to the UNFCCC the upper end of the latest IPCC recommendation of 40 to 70% reductions by 2050 compared to 2010 recognizing that this challenge can only be met by a global response.”   This statement generated the biggest headlines (“G7 leaders agree to phase out fossil fuels”), but it’s also the least consequential. Most reactions ignore the fact that the G8 leaders already agreed to “the goal of achieving at least a 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050” in advance of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. (You judge the results.) And the idea that an 85-year goal will have much impact on present policy or investment is a bit ridiculous. (Had you told a physicist in 1905 that a fifth of U.S. electricity would be generated by nuclear fission within 85 years, they would have said, “What’s a nucleus or fission?”) News reports have experts debating whether Paris can assure the world of cuts this deep. The answer should be obvious: it can’t. No decisions made today will assure any particular outcome in 2050 or 2100. For all practical purposes, the two-degree target that diplomats have talked about for the last five or so years has always been understood by policymakers to correspond to roughly a halving of global emissions by midcentury. If the-two degree target didn’t motivate deep enough emissions cuts to actually meet it, recasting it in terms of global emissions won’t change that. Having a basic guide is useful, but beyond that, the details are pretty unimportant. Bottom line: Fiddling with distant targets is a great way to generate headlines, but doesn’t do much to affect policy and emissions themselves; at best it’s marginally irrelevant, at worst it lets people feel good without doing anything.   “We reaffirm our strong commitment to the Copenhagen Accord to mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion a year from a wide variety of sources, both public and private in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation.”   This superficially sounds big: the United States and others pledged in 2009 to mobilize massive amounts of money for developing countries; observers have been skeptical that they would deliver; but now G7 leaders are emphasizing their “strong commitment” to follow through. In practice, this is mostly an exercise in redefining the original pledge so that more private financial flows get counted toward the $100 billion. This isn’t necessarily bad as a matter of policy, but the political reality is that leaders from many developing countries want (and, at Copenhagen, thought they were getting) something else. It will be up to them in Paris to decide whether they’re ok with this redefinition of the goalposts. If they are, the conference is far more likely to be successful. But what will ultimately matter politically is not whether G7 leaders claim that they’re meeting their financial pledges; it’s whether developing country leaders are willing to go along.

When President Obama and his fellow Group of Seven (G7) leaders convene this weekend at the Bavarian retreat of Schloss Elmau, they will face two tasks. The most obvious is to formulate common positions on a global agenda so sweeping that it will strain even the lengthiest communiqué. Their more subtle challenge is to signal that their advanced market democracies remain not only an anchor of order in a turbulent world but also a potential engine to drive global governance reform. The reconstitution of the G7 last year coincided with a proliferation of global crises, from the Russian seizure of Crimea and the advent of the Islamic State to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and heightened tensions in the South and East China Seas. Meanwhile, the rise of new powers and alternative groupings, such as the Group of Twenty (G20) and the BRICS, has threatened the G7 with irrelevance. Given these trends, G7 leaders must recognize that they cannot solve the world’s most pressing challenges alone. However, as a coalition of leading industrialized democracies, the G7 does play an unparalleled role as a global agenda-setter, convener, standard-bearer, and champion of the rules and norms underpinning world order. In this context, the Elmau summit will test the G7’s ability to balance what German Chancellor Angela Merkel has deemed “crisis diplomacy” with the longer-term challenges that will shape the twenty-first century. Four issues in particular bear watching at this summit. Tackling Global Growth: Economic issues will be at the forefront of the G7 summit—just as they were in 1975, when the leaders of what were then six advanced industrial democracies met for their first annual meeting at Chateau Rambouillet in France. But a lot has changed in the past forty years, particularly on the economic front. Today’s G7 nations represent only one-third of global GDP—a sizeable share, to be sure, but dwarfed by the G20’s 85 percent. Indeed, some of the most important engines of global growth are—and for the foreseeable future will be—non-G7 members, such as China, India, and Brazil. This explains, in part, why the G20 is now considered the world’s premier forum for global economic coordination. As if to underscore the G7’s economic vulnerability, the possibility of a Greek exit—or “Grexit”—from the eurozone has dominated news coverage of the upcoming summit, even though it is not on the official agenda. Merkel, for her part, is determined to prevent the Greek debt crisis from overshadowing the event, which she views as a golden opportunity to demonstrate the G7’s continued relevance and make headway on equally pressing challenges like poverty and global warming. Supporting Sustainable Development and Combating Climate Change: The Elmau summit offers a chance to build momentum behind three major UN gatherings during the second half of 2015: the Financing for Development summit in Addis Ababa in July, the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals in New York in September, and the twenty-first Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in November and December. Despite the rise of new donors like China, G7 nations remain the largest providers of official development assistance (ODA), accounting for 70 percent of total net ODA in 2013. Since 2011, the G7’s major development initiative has been the so-called Deauville Partnership, intended to assist liberal political transitions in the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring.” The G7 nations will also showcase new climate change initiatives, with an eye toward the Paris conference. On May 7, the German government announced the G7 initiative on Climate Risk insurance, which aims to increase the resilience of developing countries against climate-induced (and other natural) disasters. Another promising development was the agreement [PDF] by G7 energy ministers on May 12 that all the G7 countries’ initiatives should support a global climate treaty. Meanwhile, a coalition of 120 business leaders has sent an open letter [PDF] to the G7 finance ministers, urging them to support a long-term global emissions reduction goal in the Paris agreement and submit short- to medium-term national emissions pledges and country-level action plans. Strengthening Maritime Security: One of the novel additions to this year’s agenda (if incongruous in the alpine setting) will be maritime security. In April, G7 foreign ministers adopted a Declaration on Maritime Security outlining their concerns regarding the territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas; the problem of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; piracy and human trafficking at sea; and the conservation of marine biodiversity. Although the declaration does not explicitly refer to China by name, there is no doubt about its primary target. Reportedly, Japan had appealed to its partners in the G7 to take a stronger stance on China’s maritime assertiveness—and the document drew the ire of some in the Chinese media for its condemnation of “unilateral actions, such as large scale land reclamation,” and its opposition to “any attempt to assert territorial or maritime claims through the use of intimidation, coercion or force.” Like last year’s decision to eject the Russia, this development suggests that the G7 could be returning to its Cold War roots as a vehicle to defend the Western liberal order against potential geopolitical adversaries. Bolstering Global Health: Finally, Merkel has emerged as an eloquent advocate for reforming the World Health Organization (WHO), most recently delivering a powerful speech at the opening of the World Health Assembly last month. At Schloss Elmau, the G7 will pick up the three issues that she raised in that address: distilling lessons from the Ebola epidemic; combating poverty-related neglected tropical diseases; and tackling increased antibiotic resistance. Merkel has affirmed that the world needs a strong WHO, but she also understands that other actors—e.g., the private sector, public-private partnerships, and NGOs—play an increasingly vital role in protecting global health security. Given the financial resources and technical expertise at its disposal, the G7 is uniquely positioned to mobilize and maintain global support for outbreak preparedness and scientific research and development. Inherent in Merkel’s summit agenda is a paradox: the G7 is taking up a growing number of challenges that are global in scale, and yet it remains an exclusive club of advanced democracies. From economics and health to maritime security and climate change, all of the issues to be discussed at the summit are beyond the capacity of the G7 to resolve. What the G7 does provide is a platform to rally support for more comprehensive global efforts. Refreshingly, the chancellor herself recognizes this constraint:   The G7 cannot meet these challenges alone; we will need many other partners. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the G7 can be, indeed must be, the driving force for a world worth living in, in the long term. … That is the value-added that can be expected from G7 summits. And that is the standard against which we should measure our actions.   The G7 retains enormous symbolic value as a likeminded coalition of market democracies dedicated to the international rule of law. But to remain relevant, it must leverage its diplomatic clout and unmatched resources to drive reform in other global bodies. And indeed, this is the summit’s greatest opportunity for breakthrough. For the G7 cannot afford to become a gated retirement community in a chaotic world.