In Paris, Lula addresses the world’s urgencies – 06/28/2023 – Maria Hermínia Tavares

In Paris, last week, President Lula spoke twice. For the crowd attending the open-air Power Our Planet festival on the Champ de Mars, it escalated in decibels by demanding that rich countries pay for the environmental devastation they caused to become what they are.

Apart from a moment of self-induced shortsightedness —after all, less developed nations have also been helping to foment planetary disaster for some time—, he did not say anything new: he echoed the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”, enshrined as early as 1992 at the Unfcc (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and since then integrated into Brazilian diplomacy. The text obliges member countries of the convention to defend the climate “on the basis of equity and in accordance with their respective capacities”.

In the second speech, he addressed the heads of state and representatives of international organizations gathered at the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact. Convened by French President Emmanuel Macron, the meeting brought to the fore the reform of multilateral institutions to adapt them to the financial and economic challenges arising from the climate crisis —in particular, how to support the energy transition of countries in the so-called Global South.

For this distinguished audience, Brazilians were tough when dealing with the obsolescence of the Bretton Woods institutions in the face of the exponential increase in inequalities and the imperative to treat poverty, inequalities and climate threat as data from the same equation.

That is why in the French capital, presidential diplomacy seems to have begun to give a promising direction to protagonism across borders, this time, yes, in themes in which the Brazilian contribution can be positive and important —the opposite of the extravagant fantasy of influencing the conflict produced for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Putting the two speeches together and discounting the sometimes harsh and blunt rhetoric, they amount to the establishment of close relations between Brazil and the idea of ​​climate justice. This, as is known, leads, on the one hand, to the realization that the consequences of global warming will be much worse for the poorest and most vulnerable populations; on the other hand, the need to deal jointly with environmental risks and social needs.

Brazil’s international role in this matter is based on the importance to the world of its environmental heritage and experience in reducing poverty and inequalities. But it will be all the greater the government’s ability to take climate justice as a guide to intertwine current social and environmental policies.

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