# « Leaders are meant to lead. » — Inaugural Lecture at Sciences Po’s Paris Climate School **Date de l'événement :** 15/09/2026 * Publié le 15/09/2026 ### Date 15/09/2026 ## Chapô **Onze années consécutives parmi les plus chaudes jamais enregistrées, un système financier international resté figé dans les rapports de force du XIXᵉ siècle, des petits États insulaires en première ligne d'une crise dont ils ne sont pas responsables. Comment former une génération de dirigeants capables d'affronter cette injustice sans céder ni au zèle idéologique ni au fatalisme ? Cheffe de gouvernement de la Barbade depuis 2018 et artisane de l'Initiative de Bridgetown pour la réforme du financement climatique, Mia Mottley inaugure la première promotion de la Paris Climate School de Sciences Po avec un discours sur le courage politique et la justice climatique.** ## Corps du texte Paris has come to symbolize the importance of not being divisive in understanding what our challenges are, because we may well save the planet and still risk human existence, because human beings are not one-dimensional creatures. Having said that, without an environment within which to live, we cannot live, and therefore the balance we need to strike is why I'm here. Let me say, at the outset, to Luis Vassy, to Lawrence in his role as dean of this new school, and to the distinguished family and friends of Sciences Po, to the students who I hope will be the leaders of the world: when I was reflecting, at three o'clock this morning, on what I would say, I wrote down four words. It's ironic, because you chose to go back to that Glasgow statement, those four words were "teaching leaders to lead". That's why I'm here, because more than ever, it is only through the creation of a global movement that we are going to see the changes we need. Much of what I'm going to say is not only about climate; it is about understanding history, understanding your role in history, and why this is your moment to rise to the challenge, because for many, there have been a lot of disheartening moments over the last two years as to what is possible and what is not. But I'm here to tell you that history doesn't move in a straight line, and that more often than not, you have to find ways of remaining focused and persistent. I once watched, and I think I may even have said this the last time I addressed you here, one of the best reggae documentaries I've ever seen, in Paris, about thirty years ago, late at night on your television, which reminded me how much of an aficionado this country is of that great discipline, reggae music. And if you know Jimmy Cliff, you will recall one of his songs: _you can get it if you really want, but you must try, and try, and try, you will succeed at last._ I could just as easily reflect on the Talmud, and on the line that says it is not our duty to finish the task, we are not expected to finish the task, but neither are we at liberty to resign from it. I start at this point because the opening of this school matters, not simply because it is another institution opening its doors, but because its very creation acknowledges a truth that too many of our institutions have been slow to acknowledge: that the world we are preparing this generation for is fundamentally and profoundly different from the world for which many of our institutions were designed. I'll come back to this later in my talk, because when we look at the institutions governing us, in almost every instance they never anticipated they would be facing these challenges, and they are not structured to face them. And yet their reluctance to make the changes necessary to meet the moment is staggering. That reluctance will only change if people like yourselves are prepared to help create the movement, across borders, globally, that will give this planet its best chance of survival. My friends, the last eleven years have told us all that we need to know. We are lucky to have with us the president of the Paris COP, and we want to welcome him and thank him for his presence here this afternoon. I say simply to you that you are uniquely positioned to benefit from the people who helped create the architecture that the world is now struggling to keep alive. The fact that the United States has, for the second time, declared its desire to extricate itself from what is really the most important work of our time is unfortunate, but not fatal. I repeat: unfortunate, but not fatal, and even in their extrication, we will find that there are bridges, dignified bridges, that can be built, where their participation is still critical and still possible, without them having to be signatories to the agreements. But why have these last eleven years been so important? The truth is that scientists tell us they are the warmest on record. Just two hours ago, as I was getting ready to come here, Sky television ran a story indicating that the United Kingdom has now declared this summer the hottest ever on record, the three months of June, July and August, since records began in 1884. I do not refer to this as climate change, because for us it is not change, for us it is a climate crisis, and it is a crisis affecting almost every aspect of how we do business. But let me say, at the outset, that the danger for the world, on both sides, is zealotry, for those who believe there is only one way. Human beings are not structured like that; more often than not, balance is what brings progress. At some point I will also discuss the broader issues, because, as I said, we are not uni-dimensional creatures. Part of the reason we are facing the backlash we are facing is because people believed there was only one way to resolve this crisis. There is not, and we have to find ways, as usual, to build common partnerships and bridges that will make the difference, so we can actually achieve the progress we want. But why is the climate crisis important to you? This is not a story told in degrees Celsius, as much as we will tell you that 1.5 degrees is necessary for our survival, the reality of this story is told in the price of food, in the price of energy and insurance, in the roads, the homes, the schools that have to withstand weather conditions they were not built for. While we await the true causes, as much as we know melting glaciers would have contributed, while we await the full evidence of what happened in Nepal last week, we can go back to Pakistan a few years ago, to a flood that decimated the country; to Mozambique; to Brazil; or come right to my backyard, to Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica last year, which affected forty percent of its population; to Grenada and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines the year before. The head of the Conference of the Parties secretariat for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is a man born in Carriacou, a very small island off Grenada. The same Hurricane Beryl that decimated my own fishing industry by ninety percent, and that has forced us to spend money now rebuilding a fishing harbour and improving our coastal defences, that same Hurricane Beryl, two years ago, devastated Carriacou and other islands in the Grenadines. And then, of course, there was Dominica, which, perhaps more than any other country, embodied for us this destruction: a tropical storm one year, then Erika, then Maria, all within just over a twelve-month period, leading to the decimation of economic activity and population through exodus after those weather events. These stories are reflected in loss of life, in the loss and impairment of livelihoods, and in an inability to plan properly, because everything now is seen through the lens of what is possible and what is vulnerable, as financiers like to talk about, what is risk. What is the risk that will undermine how I engage with you, for Barbados and for Small Island Developing States across the world? This is a future we are living now. I would have stopped there if this were a few years ago, but for Barbados, for SIDS, and now for European capitals and North American regions too, this is the reality. When those children died in Texas last year, with rivers overflowing their banks, that wasn't the Caribbean, that was in the very country that denies the existence of a climate crisis. When you have the heat waves that have led to loss of life across Europe and the United Kingdom this year, that too is a result of the climate crisis. So whether we choose to speak about it or write about it, the reality is that it is not going anywhere, and our failure to confront it, and to take the actions necessary to stem the worsening situation, will only mean we suffer more. We have known forever that for every dollar we spend building resilience, we avoid six to seven dollars in damage, and yet the world continues to fail to mobilize the public and private capital necessary to avoid that damage. It is like watching a train coming at you at full speed and being stubborn about what you will do to avoid it. And it comes with a profound injustice, because many countries of the Global South have done little to contribute to this reality. Scientists accept that the stock, as opposed to the flow, is largely due to the actions of the Industrial Revolution, which, yes, on the face of it, improved the lives of many, but came at the expense of the lives of many others, and is now affecting the children of those whom it initially affected, through the extraction of blood, sweat and tears used to build out that Industrial Revolution. I often refer to our existence, in the Caribbean and the Global South, as facing a double jeopardy: having had to endure the horror of building the platform for the Industrial Revolution, only now to be taken down by the worst excesses caused by it. That is what I mean by a moment of profound injustice. And we do so in the context of an international system that is still very much in the image of the nineteenth century, not even the twentieth. That international system preserved the power relationships of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such that we now face the possible weakening of an international rules-based order, not only because of the withdrawal of funding by the powerful, but because of a lack of legitimacy and the hypocrisy reflected in who should sit on the Security Council, who should hold a veto, and in the rules of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The most classic example: to bring about sustainable change at the IMF, appropriate to the world we live in today, requires the agreement of the United States, because it owns seventeen percent of the shares, but you need eighty-five percent agreement to change the rules. Seventeen from one hundred leaves eighty-three: you are two percent short of securing the commitment of all the others to bring about meaningful change at the IMF. We could go on to discuss the World Bank, and whether there is legitimacy in the arrangements made at the time of Bretton Woods as to who should be accorded what rights and privileges of leadership, compared with what the world looks like now. In the 1940s, the Gulf states were seen as nothing more than outposts and colonies. Today, those same Gulf states command a tremendous share of the revenue produced in the energy sector, and those funds are being used, for good or ill, in ways that can be destabilizing, through the decisions made with respect to the fossil fuel industry, and whether they are prepared to do the work necessary to decarbonize fossil energy, invest in research and development, or take the action necessary to control methane, which, as we know, is eighty times more destructive than carbon in the immediate term, recognizing that methane lives in the atmosphere for only about fifteen to twenty years, while carbon lives for centuries. But in those fifteen to twenty years, methane is eighty times more destructive. So immediately we begin to recognize that the countries and entities with the capacity to change are not necessarily the same ones that control the institutions with the power to change, and that disparity, between where power effectively lies and where institutions occupy space, is something we must confront if we are truly going to see a change in how the world functions. Let us look at the role small states play. We are vulnerable to wipeout risk in a way that is disproportionate, though we are not necessarily the only ones to suffer. If I were to ask which country in the Americas is hit almost every single year by a hurricane, it is not a small island developing state, it is home, the United States of America. But they do not face wipeout risk the way Dominica did, when Hurricane Maria destroyed 226 percent of its GDP overnight. Many of the people who left Dominica after Maria have not returned to help rebuild the country. And we start from the premise of a region that, with the exception of Haiti, is severely underpopulated, and, ironically, while being developing countries, faces the same reality as European countries: ageing and declining populations. So the vulnerability, for six months of the year, to hurricanes and floods makes it difficult to plan one's reality. And when we add to this a feature that is also being badly ignored by the developed world, we begin to understand how acute these problems are: insurance is being denied to people insuring against wildfire risk in California. I assume it is only a matter of time before this happens in Europe too, if it isn't already. Insurance against floods and hurricanes is being denied in the southeast of the United States, in Florida and other vulnerable coastal states. If you want to understand the measure of the affordability crisis being foisted on citizens in those areas, look only at the electoral results in Mar-a-Lago last year, where, in President Trump's own residential district, Republicans lost badly, not because President Trump himself was a flashpoint, but because of the affordability crisis, compounded by the war in Ukraine and made far worse still by the conflict involving Iran and the Middle East. But the real change came in the issue of housing affordability: if I cannot access insurance to purchase a house, where am I going to get the money to borrow to buy it? And therein lies the rub. We're going to see this start to affect Caribbean countries even more, particularly those that rely on tourism as their major earner of foreign exchange and provider of jobs. Why? Because tourism establishments, hotels, have to refresh every three to five years to remain competitive, which means access to funding from the banking system, which means not just keeping audited accounts, but maintaining insurance as a covenant of the loans you secure. But if you cannot access insurance, how will you access funding to continuously improve your hotel product and attract visitors? And for those who can still access it, premiums have increased significantly in the last few years, in some instances by a minimum of thirty-five percent over the last five years, in other instances significantly more. And yet the developed world is doing nothing to forestall the crisis that will eventually hit the micro-economy of many of these countries, and indeed of many US states too, as I am sure will also happen here in Europe, given the parallel unfolding of similar events tied to wildfires, floods and other climatic systems. I share these things with you because there are still those prepared to compartmentalize the climate crisis, without understanding that its consequences go far and wide. Barbados, touch wood, is not as vulnerable as other Caribbean states, because of how far east we sit in the island chain, so the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea don't surround us the way they do the other eastern and northern Caribbean states. But we are affected by all the other policy frameworks that affect the others: the rise in insurance costs affects us as much as it will the Bahamas or Jamaica, who are more directly in the line of vulnerability than we will ever be. It affects Guyana and Suriname, who sit outside the hurricane belt but are peculiarly vulnerable to floods. And yet, in spite of all this, there is an absence of any coherent framework for decision-making. Having said that, the region, and in particular the Caribbean Community, to which we belong, has recognized that there are certain things we must do on our own. At the last CARICOM Heads of Government meeting, in Saint Lucia this past July, heads considered a paper reflecting on the fact that, as the fifteen member states of CARICOM, we have paid 29 billion US dollars in reinsurance premiums over the last fifteen years, and have claimed only 8.9 billion of that 29 billion. That money was sent outside the region, to make reinsurance companies here in Europe and North America more profitable, and, in our view, to benefit disproportionately from the risk we face. It is for that reason that our heads decided we must now find our own institutional solution to the issue of reinsurance, ensuring that more foreign exchange stays within the region, and, by extension, some of the profit beyond what is needed to cover claims for climatic events. I give you that one example to show you how disproportionate and unjust the situation is, and how it goes beyond the immediacy of those on the very front line of the hurricanes, in our case, Barbados. But it isn't hurricanes alone: we are one of the fifteen most water-scarce countries in the world. If you look across Africa, and across other parts of what we might call the northern world, you begin to see the extent to which the absence of groundwater is impairing development opportunities across many regions. That absence of groundwater is a major issue that is not occupying the attention of headlines, or of policy responses, sufficiently. But what does it mean? We need look no further than what is happening in West Africa, the northern parts of Ghana, the northern parts of Nigeria, at the level of insecurity that has come with it, the inability of people to earn and support their families. We can equally go across Latin America and look at regions no longer able to support the type of agriculture they previously supported. And yet the world remains untouched in how it is going to deal with these issues. In the two years since the election of President Trump, and the announcement of the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, we have sought to have different conversations. There are times in life when you have a pathway to run, and you run fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, and there are times when you have to take time, and make haste slowly. Regrettably, we are in one of those moments that requires us to be more strategic, to slow the pace but be laser-like in our focus on what we can achieve. The Bridgetown Initiative became our companion, because we recognized we needed to tell the story that the climate crisis, in and of itself, was not alone, and that what we needed finance for was not in doubt: without financing for a just transition, and without the financing necessary to support mitigation, adaptation and transformation, we would not achieve the gains you all agreed here in 2015, with great ambition. But financing isn't only needed for that, there is a whole host of other sustainable development goals that require financing too. That is where we found common purpose between the Bridgetown Initiative and what ultimately became 4P, the Paris Pact for People and the Planet, which President Macron launched here two years ago, with all of us. How can you choose between people and planet? It's an impossible choice. It's an impossible choice. And to that extent, we felt the Bridgetown Initiative would help us articulate why reform was needed of one of the critical aspects necessary for success, not the only aspect, because the other forgotten child in the whole discussion is trade and manufacturing, and I'll come to that. Very often, people assume that because we get on a platform and make wonderful speeches, that commitment translates into capability and capacity. It doesn't. The reality is that much of the geopolitical tension we see in the world now is in fact caused by a desire to control the critical minerals necessary to manage the transition the world is now undergoing, whether minerals needed to make batteries, without which solar panels cannot function properly, given their inability to provide energy at the time you need it, hence the need for storage; whether minerals needed for other technological improvements that will help us transition away from fossil fuels; or the decarbonization of the fossil fuel industry itself. What will it take to help the world understand that it is emissions which are the enemy, not the industry itself, although the industry's behaviour sometimes makes you believe otherwise? The truth is that the real enemy is in the emissions. The question, therefore, is how do we ensure a just transition on trade and manufacturing, in a way we have not sufficiently focused our minds on, particularly given that the majority of countries in the world are either small states or vulnerable developing countries, dependent on access to finance as well as to the commodities necessary to help them manage the transition. Right now I have been championing the V20, the group of about seventy-seven vulnerable developing countries, and growing, of which we took over the chairmanship from Ghana; its secretariat is in Accra. We have been fighting to create a pathway because, while the Bridgetown Initiative has fought on a broad platform to bring forward a number of issues for the reform of the financial sector, with its latest iteration reflecting on how we must change the rules of the game, shock-proof our economies, and dramatically increase financing for the SDGs, and for climate action in particular, while we've found all of that necessary, and I'll report shortly on the progress made since the first Bridgetown Initiative, the reality is that there is no similar mechanism addressing manufacturing and trade. Can there be a serious transition for developing countries across the world if they cannot finance the industrial development necessary to reach net zero in twenty-five or thirty years' time? I said I wanted to address what we have succeeded in achieving with the Bridgetown Initiative. No one gave us a chance. From the very first day, we called for the IMF to develop instruments that acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis, and that would help us build resilience, because, as I said, for every dollar spent on adaptation and resilience, we potentially save six to seven dollars in damages. Mercifully, we saw the IMF move to establish the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, and Barbados, Rwanda and Costa Rica became the first countries in the IMF's history to benefit from a long-term financing instrument, twenty years, with a ten-and-a-half-year moratorium, at affordable rates. Previously, you could not even have that discussion. We saw, in this very city, the new president of the World Bank at the time, President Ajay Banga, go on the Global Citizen platform with me to announce that, for the first time, the World Bank would include natural disaster clauses in its loan contracts with small island developing states. And to his credit, when the first and second iterations of that clause weren't quite right, the Bank responded and created one appropriate to our circumstances. We have seen debt swaps used more broadly than ever before. In the middle of Covid, my own country issued the first debt-for-nature swap, working with the Inter-American Development Bank and The Nature Conservancy, to repurchase a portion of our debt and use the interest savings to finance the Barbados Marine Sustainability Trust over a fifteen-year period, including, by the way, natural disaster and pandemic clauses in that same instrument. We then moved on to a second debt swap, a debt-for-climate swap, and in the audience today is Sebastian Espinoza, one of our two advisors at White Oak, who helped us with the innovations behind these swaps. The particular innovation of the debt-for-climate swap was that, while other swaps take the interest savings annually over time, with our swap two years ago we aggregated the interest savings and financed a major capital project up front: the construction of a new sewage treatment facility for the south coast of Barbados, one that doesn't just separate solids from liquids but treats the water, using it to replenish aquifers and to irrigate a part of the country where agriculture needs it. We won awards across Latin America and the Caribbean for that swap and its innovation. We are now working on a third, which, I should say, saw the European Investment Bank participate for the very first time, alongside the Green Climate Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank and The Nature Conservancy, providing guarantees. Taking the lead from COP28 in Dubai, where we linked climate and health, we are now moving into our first debt-for-health swap, looking to repurchase 600 million US dollars of our debt, with anticipated savings of about 150 million, to be used over three to four years to refinance parts of our healthcare system, making us more resilient, particularly as the climate crisis pushes us to the limits of our exposure to new pathogens and shifting patterns of disease. Through the Bridgetown Initiative, in this and a few other areas, we also saw the IMF open up to give Africa another seat on its board, not enough, but movement where no previous leader had achieved it, and I thank Kristalina Georgieva and Ajay Banga for their responsiveness. But I acknowledge that the global environment within which they and other development agencies must operate makes it difficult for them to move at the pace we had seen a few years ago. Pragmatism over zealotry: the methane example. But what is still possible? A few minutes ago I said that when President Trump came in, it became clear it could no longer be business as usual, and, like relationships, you have to learn the right love language to use. Because the language being used before was polarizing language. This is why you are here: you have to be taught how to use different approaches to achieve your objective, how to know when to press the brakes and when to press the accelerator. We recognized it was possible to find synergy on methane. When I asked the Saudis how they would approach the issue of controlling methane emissions from the fossil fuel sector, they looked at me perplexed and said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "How will you control emissions of methane from the fossil fuel sector?" They said, "This nonsense, we don't burn money, so we don't agree with flaring gas," which is one of the primary causes of methane emissions from the fossil fuel sector, "and we don't believe in losing money either, that's why we fix leaking pipes when they occur." And the reality hit us clearly: there is actually a common purpose between the fossil fuel industry and climate activists on methane. One wants it controlled for the benefit of the planet; the other wants it controlled for the benefit of the balance sheet, a common love language. But more importantly, why should this matter to us, that the fossil fuel industry wants it too? Because, at the end of the day, if we can buy time by controlling methane, and scientists have advised that we can buy as much as 0.3 to 0.5 degrees of reversed warming, reversed, not merely added, then that buys time for the fossil fuel industry as well, to continue investing, at warp speed, in decarbonizing technology, so that we get them fighting not only the effects of methane but the effects of fossil fuels too. Why is this important? Two reasons. I spoke earlier about capacity and commitment: we make commitments on the platforms, but when it comes time to actually buy in the equipment, you can't get it. My permanent secretary is here, and she'll tell you that when we decided to transition a portion of government's vehicle fleet to electric vehicles, we couldn't get our orders accepted here in Europe, our orders are too small, nobody wanted to supply us, and when they did, you had to wait two or three years. Yet you want us to do the right thing, and we are prepared to, but what is talked about on platforms and what is reality are completely different things. And then, of course, there is the reality of our experience with hurricanes: the very hurricanes we want to control become the very destroyers of the renewable energy infrastructure we build. Look at Jamaica with Hurricane Melissa, and what happened to the solar farms. Look at Jamaica with Hurricane Melissa, and what happened to the wind farms. We understood, very concretely and recently, that for us, one hundred percent renewable electricity generation cannot mean one hundred percent renewable energy in practice, because there is no grid connecting us to a neighbouring state or country that hasn't also been hit, unlike the luxury you have here in Europe, of being able to wheel in energy capacity after a climatic event and be back up and running in no time. In our case, with the difficulties of supply logistics created by the polycrisis of recent years, compounded by shortages from increased global demand, and further compounded by the smallness of our orders, we would be waiting, conservatively, six to nine months to replace critical generation capacity. And that means that, for us, net zero must include clean energy in a form like LNG, more likely than not, that is a discussion we are having now, because if we don't have energy for six to nine months, we don't have national security. And in small states, if you don't have national security, you don't have a state. It's as simple as that. That is why I asked you, at the beginning of this talk, to be wary of zealotry: zealotry tells you it must be all one thing or another. We don't have that luxury; we have to meet the needs of our people day to day. So you may ask why we still invest in fossil fuels in the Caribbean, while also being among the biggest proponents of renewable energy. The International Energy Agency itself has defined net zero by 2050 as still dependent on twenty percent fossil fuels, so when people write about net zero, they often ignore the fact that it includes a fossil fuel component. What we are aiming for is balanced development: more research into decarbonizing technology, and absolute, immediate action on methane. But I am in Europe, and what is Europe most politically famous for, that might cause problems here? Agricultural subsidies, agricultural protection. So we went to COP30 in Brazil expecting substantive progress on methane, because it is a no-brainer: methane is predominantly produced from the flaring of gas, from leaking pipes, and from practices in agriculture, particularly livestock rearing and rice-paddy farming, that need to be improved, as well as from waste management. What we thought was a potential point of coincidence between fossil fuel interests and climate activists exploded on the political reality of agricultural subsidies, and the folly of it. This is a lesson for you, as young students: the notion that there can be a one-size-fits-all prescription for most things in this world is nonsense. When the WTO was formed, and tried to impose a single set of rules for all countries irrespective of size, the Caribbean kept saying, from the early 1990s, that you cannot have a one-size-fits-all prescription, that rules must be appropriate to risk. Our share of global trade in goods, as Barbados, is 0.0000 percent; our share of global trade in services is 0.0001 percent. In other words, nothing we can do can distort global trade, yet to impose the same rules on us as on other countries has a disproportionate impact on our ability to exist. One-size-fits-all rules simply do not work. And so, while in methane control you are asking fossil fuel companies to use their balance sheets to stop flaring gas and fix leaking pipes, you cannot ask farmers to carry the cost of changing farming practices on their own balance sheets. That has to be the responsibility of the state, as a national public good, and that is where leadership was missing as we went into COP30 in Brazil, and where we must pick the battle back up: to make it clear to ordinary citizens in Europe, Latin America and India that we are not asking farmers to carry the burden of adjustment alone, but asking the state to accept it as a national public good, and the international community to accept it as an international public good. That is why the World Bank has been working to develop new practices for rice-paddy farming that can genuinely change how people farm, to help control methane. Three months ago I had the privilege of opening a G7 colloquium here on methane, with Minister Babu, and for the first time we really had all the players at the table. Have we reached where we need to be? No. Are we beginning to see signs of movement? A little, with the naked eye, but enough to give us the comfort and the courage to be, as I said earlier, a Jimmy Cliff kind of people: we can get it if we really want, but we must keep going at it. While our ultimate destination is an international treaty, with legal obligations, as we achieved with the Montreal Protocol, a very successful climate agreement that transitioned behaviour; when I became a minister at twenty-eight, a young girl, that was what we were discussing then, and we've since seen air conditioners change, and much else besides, to help achieve the objectives of that agreement, today we have a world that is frightened of legal commitments, and so we will have to do it in stages to reach that point, in a way that, twenty or thirty years ago, you could probably have achieved in one fell swoop. I'm telling you these things because you have to develop the patience and the strategy to recognize that the issues you will face are multifaceted, and that simply talking about the crisis and what must be done will not be enough, because finance is one thing, but it doesn't speak to justice; technology is one thing, but it doesn't speak to the politics and the political will necessary for movement across these areas; and the law is one thing, but people's reality is another. So you have to understand the language of finance and of justice, of technology and of politics, of law, but also the needs of ordinary people. I believe Covid made the world far more restless. When you deprive people of the agency to move, as we had to, to contain the public health crisis, there is bound to be a corresponding backlash, and that backlash showed up simply in people saying, "I want agency over what I do and how I move," in ways that hadn't existed before. Amazon never believed it would become unionized; nor did Starbucks. But three years of pandemic changed the mood among workers and working classes. And the cancer of indifference that Pope Francis reminded us of, as one of the greatest threats we face in this world today, where people are so consumed with their own circumstances that they cannot be sensitive to the realities of others around them, has become one of the things we must now confront. I want, toward the end, to leave you with a few thoughts. If the World Bank were created today, would it look the way it does? Its very name, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, whose reconstruction, whose development? Can a bank focused on rebuilding Europe, and some of Europe's colonies, after the Great War, be the same bank that manages the sustainability of the global commons? Can we ignore the rise of independent countries, the rise of a rules-based order, and the global interdependence we have seen over recent decades, or is that now simply our new reality, particularly given the global movement of people, of trade, of money? Even though we are yet to value human beings as much as we value money, we can find rules that govern the seamless movement of money across borders, but we don't know how to manage the movement of people, and we still treat people like chattel, over and over, with migration issues. And the irony is that a genuine global commons is absolutely necessary to prevent exactly what happened during the pandemic: one part of the world impinging on the quality of life, or the right to life, of people in other, completely distant parts of the world. What must that global commons look like, for us to understand the role banks and countries must play in respecting the globalization that has inevitably taken place over the last century? We start with the planetary crisis, the triple crisis: climate, loss of biodiversity, and pollution. Then, less academically, where those three things really hit the road: access to water and access to food. Water and food will be the new oil of the next century. Then the other consequences of the planetary crisis: pandemics that become regional or global, with the ability to shut down movement, to shut down countries, and to force the diversion of funds away from development and toward mere survival. And those three things, together, lead to conflict and war, the consequences of which require immediate intervention, or our humanity, and our sense of who we are, becomes compromised. And then, of course, there is the other great crisis of our times: the deepening technological divide, reinforcing the inequity of power, the inability to identify and agree on facts, and the empowering of a handful of people to dominate the world in the way nation-states once dominated it through colonial expansion, but now in the hands of individuals. Your generation has to find a solution for the preservation of the global commons, whether at the World Bank, in terms of financing, recognizing that the Bank must change not only its mission but its modalities for financing, because there is a shortage of public money, given the diversion of attention across so many other issues, from Ukraine to supply-chain disruption to AI. And yet, at the same time, we need to spend money to avoid worse crises, and the perfect example is how we treat migration: instead of investing to stabilize countries along their development path, we are cutting back. Your own agency here has seen a reduction of almost two-thirds of its budget; in the United Kingdom it is almost no different. And yet you are among the people who actually understand this, not those trying to create new facts who don't. So if we're losing ground even among those who understand it, how much worse off are we? The reality is that the majority of migrants who come in a haphazard way would much rather come through a structured platform, to sell their services and go back, than risk their lives in boats that offer no guarantee of arrival. But who, and where, are we now, that we can't even have these conversations with our own populations, so that they understand that one of the consequences of an ageing, declining population is that you cannot sustain your growth path, in Europe and in North Atlantic countries, without the benefit of additional skills and services? And yet we are reducing our aid and support for developing countries. I want to leave you understanding that refinancing the World Bank is as important a mission as repurposing it, and that its sources of funding can no longer be only public. We have to look at multinational corporations whose actions contribute to the harm; the simple principle of "the polluter pays" carries us there, and the law of tort carries us there too. And then, of course, there is the role of philanthropy, those who have already made their money, but who choose to spend it on what they want, rather than on what the world needs. Unless we recognize that the changes needed are being thrust upon us, we will lose this battle as humanity. For those who say this is too tall an order, too high a moment for us to reach, I say simply: they said the same thing about women's right to vote. They said the same thing about civil rights for Black people in the United States and other countries. They said the same thing about apartheid in South Africa, as a student in London, at the LSE, from 1983 to 1986, and reading for the bar in 1987, I was told it was not going to happen, that it was impossible, and that we were running around like chickens without heads. Four years later, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. Three years after that, he became President of the Republic of South Africa. It is impossible, until it happens. In every instance I've just mentioned, the cause was not won by doubtful men and women. First, it required moral courage and political will, but these causes were ultimately achieved because global movements developed. Reparations are only a topic for discussion in the world today because George Floyd's death made it repugnant, in the eyes of ordinary people, for one human being to be treated that way because of the colour of his skin. And I say to you today, as the inaugural class of the Paris Climate School at Sciences Po, that you have been chosen to lead, and that part of your dean's responsibility, in preparing you over these next two years, is not only the science and the economics, but shaping within you the moral courage necessary to teach you how to lead, and to find that leadership not only on large platforms and in treaties, but wherever ordinary people are gathered, because it is through those conversations that the type of government people elect, and the type of policies that government is prepared to follow, will be determined. In the same way that the history of the world shows you the evolution of how economic activity has been organized, from the joint-stock company to the limited liability company, institutions evolving to meet the needs of their time, in the same way that the nation-state itself developed, and did not exist in the form we know today from time immemorial, I suggest to you that you will be required to craft new instruments and new organizations, and to test the law. But none of this matters if you are not also changing the conscience and the views of ordinary human beings, in the small communities where they live. And if you remember nothing else from what I say today, remember this: you cannot win the big transformational battles without addressing the small irritants. "Why can't I get access to bus services, and more services, in my own community, but you want to take money and send it away to Africa or the Caribbean?", without connecting that reality to what we are actually trying to do, which is to change the world. Why aren't we spending more money on mitigation, globally, public and private money, when mitigation can take place anywhere in the world, while adaptation is peculiar to geography? So, my friends, I end with my own personal philosophy. Earlier this year, when my government was re-elected for the third time, I told the country that the mission is the same: _a luta continua_, the struggle continues, because, as I said at the beginning, we are not expected to complete the battle, but neither are we at liberty to resign from it. I give the country, as I give you, the three things that inspire me to action, and I trust and pray they will inspire some of you too: first, to stop poor people from being poor, because there is more than enough wealth in this world for people to share; second, to fight injustice wherever it exists, whether at the personal level, or within the institutional structures of the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the other agencies we have created globally in the image of a time that no longer exists, protecting relationships of power that no longer reflect reality; and third, to create opportunity for people. Public entities are facing serious fiscal crises because of this moment of polycrisis. Rather than accept that, we are trying, through what we call the Bridge to Viability Compact, which I invite you to follow and read, a compact we signed in Vienna two months ago with the League of Arab States' member entities, as well as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank, the Latin American Development Bank, the African Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to find a way to make peace, slowly, during this period of global instability, by agreeing that we must find longer-term financing for education, health and water loans, because you cannot build schools, or hospitals, or replace water mains, with ten- or twelve-year money. I ask you: if we can create those opportunities, if we can fight injustice, and if we can stop poor people from being poor, then we create the basis for the global movement that will allow the majority of the world's population, who want to save this planet, to actually do so, rather than remain at the mercy of a few who hold on to power as if it were their divine right. It is up to you to make that change for global humanity. And I have every confidence that this school, which has already done so much to create opportunities for people across the world, will do so again, with this innovative educational venture, to provide the leadership needed to protect the planet, and to protect people. Thank you. ## **Licence :** `#CC-BY-NC-ND (Attribution, Pas d'utilisation commerciale, Pas de modification)` ### Thématique `#Environnement` **Langue :** `#Français` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)