Spring Meeting 2024

In addressing the twin urgency of climate transition and development, a stark financial reality emerges immense funding is required for both of these urgencies, yet fiscal resources remain constrained. Countries face a dilemma, balancing environmental sustainability against poverty alleviation, without the luxury of choice. Development banks have expanded their portfolios in response, yet the scale of investment does not fill the vast funding gap. More capital is essential, as is targeted, efficient allocation.

The focus must be on a strategic approach where every dollar is directed towards interventions yielding the most transformative impact, thereby advancing a sustainable and just global framework. Through a high-level panel, the Spring Meeting discussed ways of solving the joint climate transition and development conundrum through enhanced North-South cooperation.

With the acceleration of the green transition towards net-zero, demand for minerals essential to the manufacturing of technologies such as wind mills, solar panels and electric batteries is projected to steeply increase. Current estimates indicate that the increase would have to reach four-fold to reach the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting the planet’s temperature to 2°C. This rise in demand could represent an economic opportunity for producing countries, with prospects for increased income and employment. However, current geopolitical tensions and mistrust are preventing us from addressing the urgent economic, financial, social and environmental challenges associated with the extraction, use and reuse of transition minerals.

The Paris Peace Forum is working to facilitate multistakeholder dialogue on these issues, through the organization of two high-level sessions gathering actors from a diversity of sectors and geographies. The first session focused on how mineral-producing countries can benefit from the extraction and processing of minerals for the energy transition in terms of development, industrialization and support the overall welfare of their citizens. The second session focused more widely on how to achieve an inclusive energy transition, through North and South collaboration.

The Global Council for Responsible Transition Minerals was launched during the Spring Meeting. Composed of a diversity of high-level individuals from all over the world, its aim is to leverage their expertise and influence to steer the global community towards a shared objective: ensuring an adequate and responsible supply of minerals to achieve the energy transition.

Over the next thirty years, the agricultural landscape in Africa will face profound challenges intertwined with issues of food security and sustainability. With a rapidly growing population projected to double by 2050, the continent’s agricultural sector must undergo transformative changes to meet escalating food demands while safeguarding natural resources and ecosystems. Climate change exacerbates these pressures, with unpredictable weather patterns, increased frequency of extreme events, and degradation of arable land posing significant threats to agricultural productivity. Moreover, Africa remains disproportionately affected by hunger and malnutrition, underscoring the urgent need for sustainable agricultural development to ensure food security for current and future generations.

In this context, the Paris Peace Forum is working to reconcile the climate and agricultural development agendas, mobilize multi-stakeholders and to bring North and South closer together on the basis of common interests and principles. Part of the work of the Spring Meeting was therefore dedicated to “Promote Fair Agricultural Transitions in Africa.

Malnutrition is a major public health problem affecting a significant proportion of the world’s population (149.2 million children under five are stunted and 45.4 million are emaciated, etc.). As such, the effects of malnutrition concern various aspects of the global governance spectrum (health, development, food systems, etc.), both in the Global South and in the Global North, since it also encompasses obesity (39% of people over 18 were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese). Following on from the summits in London in 2012 and Tokyo in 2021, the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit will take place in Paris in 2025 and will be a major event given the scale of the issue.

The Spring Meeting of the Paris Peace Forum was the kick-off for discussions leading up to the N4G. On this occasion, the PPF brought together an independent panel of experts to begin work on the scientific evidence that should guide the decisions taken at the N4G. The Forum also gathered a group of private sector representatives to begin work on corporate commitments to help fight malnutrition worldwide. This meeting represented an opportunity to break down silos and address the topic beyond the nutrition community, in order to identify and prioritize essential solutions and bring them to scale.

The devastating consequences of pandemics, from the COVID-19 to repeated outbreaks of avian flu, Ebola, and HIV, underscored the urgent need for early warning systems to detect and respond to emerging infectious diseases effectively. As the COVID-19 pandemic showed us, access to genetic sequence data is crucial to respond early to a health threat. While data being used to develop new medical products often comes from scientific institutions in the Global South, it does not always lead to compensation or access to medical countermeasures needed to fight a pandemic. A key element of the “Fair Transitions” is therefore to recognize the role of these institutions, and to build strong foundations for the fair-sharing of data, and fair-benefit from the proceeds of the use of such data.

Part of the work of this Spring Meeting was therefore devoted to advancing conversations on this notion of fair benefit-sharing and, more generally, on how to draw lessons on solidarity and equity to build a more cohesive global health ecosystem. The Forum presented its work on a compensatory mechanism, but also opened the debate to take stock of the conversations planned at the World Health Assembly around a pandemic agreement, the views of the African continent on regionalization strategies in health, and on financing needs in the ecosystem.