Reading through the slogans of the past G20 Summits I observed a curious pattern. Mentions to “crisis” and “growth” have given way to expressions such as “sustainable development” and caring for “our planet”. It struck me like a splash of cool water in a summer afternoon: soon enough, “G20” will stand for “Green 20”.

Clearly, this year’s G20 motto “Building a just world and a sustainable planet” is a far cry from the Summit’s first edition aspirations of “Recovery and new beginnings”. What started as a grouping of Finance Ministers and central Bank Governors, became an annual summit of heads of state (which now includes nineteen countries and two regional state unions) with a straightforward objective: providing a political response to the 2008 financial crisis.
At the 2008 Washington DC Summit, world leaders committed to “restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world’s financial systems”. Mentions to environmental and climate concerns were scarce (only one mention to “climate change”), and “sustainability” was framed in an economic perspective. It took the G20 a few years to grasp the concept of Sustainable Development (later evidenced at the Buenos Aires 2018 Summit) and to internalize climate change awareness. Before that, sustainability was only a thin notion and climate change was ranked near the bottom of the priority list. In the 2010 Toronto Summit, climate change was considered part of the scope of Multilateral Development Banks, along with other challenges such as tackling the lack of transparency of international institutions, “lifting the lives of the poor” and providing “food security”. 

By 2011, the Cannes Summit declared the G20 leaders ready to operationalize the newly-drafted Green Climate Fund and to “fight against climate change”. Although the text framed those goals as “one of [G20 leaders’] main priorities”, it circumscribed the strategy within the climate mitigation front. The 2012 Los Cabos Summit reaffirmed the commitments to sustainable development which were adopted at the United Nations (Rio+20) Conference earlier that year and stressed the idea of “green growth”, thus highlighting the capitalization opportunities underlying the initially mitigation-oriented notion of “climate finance”.

The 2013 St. Petersburg Summit  reiterated the fight against climate change, welcomed the outcomes of COP18 and expressed support to the upcoming climate conferences and what would become the Paris Agreement. Only in the brief five-sheet Leaders’ Communiqué of the Brisbane 2014 Summit did climate change make it to the first page, but under rather generic considerations.

However, the Antalya Summit (Turkey, 2015) marked the association between “actions on energy” and “tackling climate change”. And though this did not lead to immediate coordination of such efforts, it signalized an important acknowledgment given that G20 countries account for ca. 78% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

Steadily but surely, climate concerns found their way to the foreword of the summit declarations. Alongside ongoing working groups such as the Environment and Climate Sustainability Working Group (established in 2017) a specific Task Force for the Global Mobilization against Climate Change will be launched this year to coordinate the responses of the G20 Sherpa Tracks and Financial Tracks related to climate change.

In this manner, what used to be a mostly economic-oriented international governance forum, has become a climatized arena. This means that issues such as global economic growth and Financial Markets regulation, which were formerly addressed as unrelated to climate change, are now being considered through a “climatic lens”. 

It is true that most G20 countries are relevant actors to the international climate regime, given that they are part of the UNFCCC, the Paris Agreement and other important climate treaties. Nevertheless, the G20 is a distinct fora and its agenda has been progressively climatized. In other words, many topics on the G20 agenda have aligned with climate change concerns.

This interesting phenomenon is expected to intensify under this year’s Brazilian presidency of the G20, for it will be coupled with Brazil’s hosting of COP30 in 2025. Observing the varying modes and degrees of climatization raises relevant questions as to how these dynamics of climatization are shaped, according to what logic, and to which combinations of interests? And most importantly, we should be asking ourselves (and our leaders) whether climatizing the G20 agenda will actually help us solve the climate problem.

Bibliographical References

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