Never before in history has a prime minister from a small Caribbean nation (population 288,430) had such an impact on global discussions of climate change and the continuing inequalities that exist between the world’s wealthiest nations and those who continue to struggle under multiple economic disadvantages, which were created historically and maintained to this day. I speak, of course, of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley.
What is even more impressive is that a Black woman’s voice is being taken so very seriously by both formerly colonized and exploited nations, and their former colonizers.
I have written about Mottley here frequently; however, given her grueling global schedule, I have quite a bit of catching up to do since I last wrote about her back in March.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: At COP27, Barbados PM Mia Mottley is a powerful voice addressing climate change
Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
LONDON, June 22, 2023 — World-famous screen writer, director and UN Advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals Richard Curtis, is urging everyone – including World Leaders – to ‘Listen to Mia’ at Global Citizen’s Power Our Planet: Live in Paris event, being held in Paris on 22nd June to coincide with The Summit for a New Financial Pact.
A new video, featuring Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and created by Curtis, will be played to a crowd of twenty thousand at the free, ticketed event, which will include performances from global superstars such as Lenny Kravitz and Billie Eilish. Curtis created the film to amplify the voice and profile of Prime Minister Mottley – Co-Chair of the Power Our Planet campaign and also Co-Chair of the UN Advocates for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Power Our Planet: Live in Paris is taking place on the sidelines of the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact, hosted by President Macron. The Summit is attempting to lay the groundwork for a new financial system that is fairer and more equitable globally, and will see world leaders come together to take action on these global challenges and accelerate the much-needed transition. The Power Our Planet event, which takes place in front of the Eiffel Tower, aims to drive commitments from world leaders and the private sector in support of Global Citizen’s campaign, which is calling for a seismic shift in the way the world’s financial systems work to give the world’s poor and developing nations access to the financing they urgently need.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this type of campaign around a global event—and certainly not with a Caribbean leader as the central focus.
Here’s the “Listen to Mia!” video, which includes brief clips from several of Mottley’s speeches.
The Global Goals’ YouTube video notes:
Barbados Prime Minister and SDG advocate Mia Mottley has a plan to fix Multilateral Development Banks so they can work to save the world. These banks exist to reduce poverty and combat the effects of climate change by investing in development. At the moment, they’re a little too risk averse to direct sufficient amounts of money to where it’s needed, but Mia Mottley has the right kind of plan to change this.
On the 22nd of June, we are unveiling a new video in Paris, on the sidelines of the Summit for a New Financing Pact, called Listen to Mia. No one does a better job of explaining why the system needs reform than Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley. We want the whole world to listen to her because she has a plan – the Bridgetown Initiative.
Join a growing movement of leaders calling on reform of the global development finance system and stay tuned for more updates.
Find out more here: https://www.one.org/international/blo…
In 2015, world leaders agreed to 17 Global Goals (officially known as the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs). These goals have the power to create a better world by 2030, by ending poverty, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change. Guided by the Goals, it is now up to all of us, governments, businesses, civil society and the general public to work together to build a better future for everyone.
Prior to speaking at the Paris Conference, Mottley took the stage with World Bank President Ajay Banga in front of a huge, supportive audience. Attendees were not happy when the prime minister brought up President Emmanuel Macron of France, but Mottley responded with a pragmatic admonishment.
Global Citizen’s YouTube video notes:
Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley joins World Bank President Ajay Banga on stage at Power Our Planet: Live in Paris on June 22, 2023, to call for climate finance from world leaders, financial institutions, and the private sector. Banga announces a new debt pause option — made possible because of Global Citizens — for countries struggling with debt repayments in the aftermath of a natural disaster to combat the mounting global debt crisis.
Rachel Kyte reports for Reuters:
Prime Minister Mottley and her team have already successfully reframed the questions of climate finance and debt forgiveness as symptoms of a broken financial system. The Paris summit provides a vital staging post towards essential change and innovation. But for actual system change, all governments must engage with greater urgency in the coming months.
From Paris, this urgent work will pass to the first African Climate Summit in Kenya, the G20 meeting in India, where MDB reform is being discussed, the U.N. General Assembly, the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Morocco and, at the end of the year, the climate talks in the United Arab Emirates. It’s a punishing schedule of international meetings, which if it works, should build both support and momentum for international financial system change. For those who are becoming increasingly vulnerable and for whom the current system isn’t working, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
In her speech on June 23, Mottley labeled the gathering the “How Dare You” summit.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria sat down with Mottley on Sunday, after she spoke in Paris.
ZAKARIA: Climate change has imperiled island nations like Barbados with more intense hurricanes and more frequent floods and droughts. The nation’s prime minister, Mia Mottley, popped into global consciousness two years ago when she delivered a speech advocating forcefully for global action on climate change and for the rich nations to do more.
She has declared that the crisis is a code red emergency. I sat down with her last week on the sidelines of the summit for a new global financing pact in Paris. It was organized by President Emmanuel Macron and aimed at tackling the global challenges of climate change and poverty. Here is our conversation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA: Madam Prime Minister, pleasure to have you on again.
MIA MOTTLEY, PRIME MINISTER OF BARBADOS: Thank you so much, Fareed.
ZAKARIA: So, you’re very eloquent but also very frank. So, I’ve got to ask you there are a lot of people in the north, in the United States, in Britain, in France saying, why should we at a time when we’re just recovering from the COVID economy, we have inflation, why should we be providing more money and in whatever form, financing and things like that, to countries in the developing world to deal with climate change or whatever it is? What do you say to them?
MOTTLEY: Two fundamental reasons. One, it was their industrialization and their prosperity that caused the problem but more importantly than even that now they don’t live on a different planet from us. There is no blame game any more on this planet. If we don’t find a way of living on this planet together, as Ajay Banga says, we need to remove poverty on a livable planet. And the reality is there is no plan to go on Mars yet.
What happened in the last winter in the United States of America in Wyoming with temperatures 30 degrees from ours, what happened last week in Canada with smoke coming down to New York and D.C., how much more evidence do we need to know that we are in this together. And unless we can limit the temperatures to below 1.5 consistently, because we’ve gone there already, unless we can do it consistently, it will be, as I said in Glasgow, a death sentence.
ZAKARIA: But it’s going to take trillions of dollars, right?
MOTTLEY: That’s right.
ZAKARIA: I mean, we’re talking about sums of money larger than people can really even imagine. How do you get to those numbers?
MOTTLEY: Well, you talk more than I do about the disparity in income and the whole inequality gap in the United States of America. Where is that coming from? I believe that in addition to getting countries to summon the will to be able to increase their capital in the World Bank and other regional development banks we also — and in addition to the technical things we can do to unlock private sector capital, there is the reality that we need to find a new source of capital for global public goods. And we believe that multi-national corporations who are benefiting egregiously, who have caused the problem, need to leave a few cents on a dollar profit on the table.
[10:35:10]ZAKARIA: To you when you look at what is going on in Paris with this climate financing conference and others, do you think we’re on the right track?
MOTTLEY: I do think that we’re moving in the right direction. But I don’t think we’re moving with the pace or with the scope that is necessary. Whether we like it or not, it is coming at us. And if you know you’re on a track, and a train is coming at you at full speed, you don’t stay on the track. And what is necessary now is for us to build a coalition.
Regrettably, I think, what is happening is that domestic politics and geopolitics are getting in the way of us doing right thing. We know what has to be done. But unless the political will can overcome the geopolitics and overcome the domestic politics, we’re not going to get there without significant losses of lives and a significant impairing of livelihoods.
ZAKARIA: You’ve been sounding the alarm on this for a while. Do you come at this fundamentally as an optimist? Do you think we’re going to get there?
MOTTLEY: I have to be. I genuinely believe that we can get there. We are human beings. We have the capacity to reason. We have the capacity engage.
I think one of our disappointments in the developing world on the pandemic and on the climate crisis is the absence of global leadership, absence of global moral strategic leadership that brings people to the table and says, hey, we need to leave something each and every one of us. In my own country, I use a simple motto, share the burden, share the bounty.
If we don’t share the burden of saving the planet, then it is a moot point. And to believe that mankind cannot become extinct or that civilizations don’t become failed is also a false narrative because we know of failed civilizations and we know of extinct species on Earth.
ZAKARIA: Prime Minister, always a pleasure to have you on.
MOTTLEY: Always a pleasure to be with you and please keep up the excellent work.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
Prior to Paris, on June 15 Mottley spoke in Geneva at the World of Work Summit.
The World of Work Summit 2023: Social Justice for All is a high-level forum for global voices to address the need for increased, coordinated and coherent action in support of social justice. It will provide an opportunity to discuss and inform the proposal to forge a Global Coalition for Social Justice, which was welcomed by the Governing Body of the International Labour Office at its 347th Session (March 2023).
The 2-day Summit will highlight the key role of social justice in creating a more sustainable and equitable world and will discuss strategies for increased and better-aligned joint action to advance social justice and ensure policy coherence. It will provide a forum for participants to share their vision of, and priorities for, social justice and to showcase the actions they are taking and they commit to take to advance social justice. It is expected that the outcomes of the Summit will inform discussions in other multilateral forums of the centrality of and strategies to achieve greater social justice, such as, in 2023, the Sustainable Development Goals Summit, the G20 and the summits of the BRICS countries.
Caribbean UN’s YouTube video notes:
Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Amor Mottley, spoke at the World of Work Summit at #ILC2023 in Geneva today. aAt this high-level forum for global voices to address the need for increased, coordinated and coherent action in support of social justice, the Prime Minister highlighted the need to be fair to achieve this goal.“At the core to finding solutions for so many of the crises in our world now is a simple concept. It is just called fairness. Fairness is another word for social justice,” she said during her feature address.
After Paris, Mottley’s next stop was an official state visit to China.
While there, she spoke at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin.
AMNC 2023: Prime Minister of Barbados calls for ‘urgent action’ on climate crisis
Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, has urged governments and private sector leaders to take immediate action on addressing climate change. She was speaking at the 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions as part of a panel on ‘Braving the Headwinds: Rewiring Growth Amid Fragility’.
“I think we are all agreed that first and foremost, the world is facing a climate crisis,” Mottley said during the World Economic Forum’s gathering in Tianjin, China. “What is required is urgent action.”
[…]In 2022, Barbados released a plan to reform the way wealthier countries finance poorer countries in a climate crisis. The Bridgetown Initiative, named after the island’s capital city, calls for emergency liquidity to mitigate the debt crisis faced by many countries and expand multilateral lending by $1 trillion.
The project has been compared to the Marshall Plan, the 1948 US aid programme that provided more than $13 billion of foreign aid to help Western Europe recover after World War II. “The problem is that there is a serious disparity in the pricing of capital between the global north and the global south,” Mottley explained during the session in Tianjin. “We therefore have to start where we can make meaningful progress and we believe that is in the area of finance.”
Mottley has also worked hard to strengthen political and economic ties between Caribbean and African nations. In June she was a speaker at the Afreximbank gathering in Ghana.
PM Mottley asserted, “We, the leaders of the Caribbean and African nations, must continue our developmental journeys together, for the path to our mutual success will be one forged in unity.”
“Today was a historic moment for people of African descent. It was clear to me that as we came together – leaders from the Caribbean and the African continent – the path to our mutual success will be one forged by unity, “said the prime minister.
Yes, their collective histories have been impacted by colonialism, but she believes the future is now theirs to shape.
She said that whether it be by improving the connectivity of their people by increased airlift, functional cooperation, improved access to services, tourism and cultural exchanges or creating linkages between their regional institutions, their experiences and the work they have done to get to this point has shown them that they can, and will find success by looking east and west to each other, instead of only looking north.
And as Mottley tweeted:
Here are the prime minister’s full remarks.
Mottley’s quoting of the late Rep. Shirley Chisholm—“If there’s no seat at the table, bring your own chair”—in her speech moved me.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados is a force to be reckoned with
I hope you learned more about this remarkable woman today. Please join me in the comments for more, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
