Germany is home to some key health businesses…
Yes, Germany has a really interesting role to play with the G7 presidency. I think there are big opportunities for both the health and the climate advocates, but these are unlikely to arise just on their own accord within the policy-making community, because you have these ministerial silos. There is big scope for bottom-up initiatives like we have at the Global Solutions Initiative. We spend all our time thinking about how to solve global problems in the public interest, and we have the freedom to think across governmental silos.
One of the reasons the German government gave us the mandate to lead the T7 process jointly with the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) is because they are hoping we are going to introduce the same structure to the T7 as we did to the T20 and then provide advice to both the G7 and the G20 from a common source. Then, these two communities, which often pull in different directions, can come to cooperate.
You’ve talked about the need for bottom-up climate efforts. However, everything we know about the German G7 presidency plans are the big top-down ideas, such as creating an international climate club with a uniform CO2 floor price, or bilateral climate partnerships. Are all these proposals worthless?
No, you definitely need them. In order to get where we need to be on climate policy, it is necessary for the people of the world to cooperate. We need to ensure that in aggregate we do not exceed our greenhouse gas emission limits. Currently, we don’t have a system that does this. We’ve got voluntary nationally determined contributions which are quite often ignored. If you don’t have a mechanism whereby countries reliably and verifiably commit themselves to follow through on their promises, you will never get there.
The G7 presidency changes every year, providing little room for consistency. Can they still play an important role in climate policy?
One thing we’d like to get going within the German presidency is consistent measurement of societies’ wellbeing from year to year, not only with regard to the GDP, but also relevant environmental and social indicators. We’ve developed the recoupling dashboard which could be used to measure progress within the G7 or G20, rather than just economic growth. This would provide a consistent way carrying from one presidency to another. To have a set of think tanks like us going over the long run advising these groups could be a useful way of keeping the flames alive.
