G20 Brisbane Australia - Environment and Climate Change

The efforts of the Australian Government not to have climate change included as part of the G20 Brisbane meeting agenda or discussed in any prominent manner were ultimately futile.

The G20 Leaders Communique included at item 19, the following statement -

"We support strong and effective action to address climate change. Consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its agreed outcomes, our actions will support  sustainable development, economic growth, and certainty for business and investment. We will work together to adopt successfully a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the UNFCCC that is applicable to all parties at the 21^st  Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015. We encourage parties that are ready to communicate their intended nationally determined contributions well in advance of COP21 (by the first quarter of 2015 for those parties ready to do so). We reaffirm our support for mobilising finance for adaptation and mitigation,such as the Green Climate Fund".

How much money is needed?

The G20 summit in London concluded this week and the leaders of the member countries have committed to $1.1 trillion in new funds which will greatly increase the capital available to the International Monetary Fund. The goal in mind is a revival in trade, which is expected to contract this year for the first time in 30 years. Of note however the combination of loans and guarantees fell short of an injection of fresh fiscal stimuli into the world economic system — this was due to division between Continental Europe and the United States over whether to act now or wait to see whether existing spending measures took effect.

Most member countries have already committed major funding outlays and released vast sums of funds into their economies through various mechanisms - in the US this has meant buying up the bad debts and loans which their banking system had both created and then shared with the world. In Australia, the strategy is to stimulate consumer spending by providing actual cash payments to families earning under $100K per annum. The question is whether these levels of payments are sufficient to compensate for the loss of economic activity due to the mismanagement in part of the world (and US in particular) banking system. Will it be enough?