Italy kicks off a big October of G20 and COP 26 summits

ITALY kicks off a big October of G20 (Group of 20) leadership diplomacy on Tuesday with an Afghan-themed summit, but the main event will be the last weekend of the month with a meeting focused on broader issues, especially the pandemic, and COP 26 climate summit.

These twin summits will see world leaders in attendance from China, Germany, India, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, the European Union, and the United States. Collectively, these powers account for some 90 per cent of global GDP, 80 per cent of world trade, and around 66 per cent of global population.

With its proximity to next month's COP event, this year's G20 events have the potential to become the most important since the 2009 meeting in London during the storm of the international financial crisis. While Italy is one of the club's least prominent states, Prime Minister Mario Draghi is hoping to use his own political prominence and global connections to help the nation make an impact.

This process starts on Tuesday with the extraordinary summit on Afghanistan which will focus on humanitarian aid, security, human rights and combating terror. The talks will also see the participation of the Netherlands, Spain and Qatar in addition to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the United Nations (UN) with the goal of constructing a significant package of support to avert what Draghi fears may be a humanitarian catastrophe this Winter.

POST-PANDEMIC RECOVERY

Beyond next week, attention will turn quickly to two other big issues. Firstly, the post-pandemic recovery - hopefully - to come.

The IMF's managing director Kristalina Georgieva has said the world economy remains "hobbled" by the coronavirus crisis as she revealed that her organisation had cut its forecast for international growth this year. She said the most serious obstacle to a full recovery is the vaccine divide between rich and poor nations, and she added that the global economy could face a cumulative US$5.3 trillion loss over the next 5 years unless it is closed.

Earlier this spring, the IMF had proposed a US$50 billion project aimed at ending the pandemic by vaccinating 40 per cent of people globally by the end of 2021, and at least 60 per cent by the first half of 2022. Doing so, IMF officials say, would inject the equivalent of US$9 trillion into the global economy by 2025 due to a faster resumption of economic activity

While the ambition of the IMF plan won't now be realised, one of the prizes Draghi is still seeking from this year's summit is the development of a genuinely global, comprehensive response to the pandemic which has been stymied to date by the lack of interest in this outcome from some key world leaders. This includes former US president Donald Trump who decided last year to play golf rather than attend all the G20 sessions of the Saudi-hosted leadership meeting, including one on pandemic preparedness, following his decision last year to pull the US out of the World Health Organization (WHO).

With Trump now out of office, and Western countries split on the issue of vaccine patent waivers with Germany strongly against, another key division within the G20 in recent years is between China and the US. Trump railed last year over what he calls the "China virus", and at a key G20 session Chinese President Xi Jinping focused his remarks on US trade barriers rather than a domestic Chinese fiscal stimulus as the best route to growth, urging G20 members to cut tariffs, remove barriers and facilitate the unfettered flow of trade.

So even now, not all G20 leaders have fully embraced the advice of WHO director general Tedros Ghebreyesus last year to come together to find joint solutions to Covid-19 and "ignite a new global movement" to ensure that it never happens again. In a context of criticisms that world leaders have failed to produce a quicker response to the pandemic, the WHO chief asserted that "you have to come together to confront the defining health crisis of our time: we are at war with a virus that threatens to tear us apart - if we let it" - stressing that the pandemic is a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities, respecting no borders.

CHALLENGES

If the challenge of bridging these pandemic-related gaps wasn't big enough for Draghi, he must also try to marshal a consensus ahead of COP 26. Italy is heavily vested in the outcome of November's big event as it is the UK's partner in its organisation with preparatory meetings held in Italy in September and October.

All of this highlights that this year could be one of the most consequential G20s since the 2009 meeting in London amid the international financial crisis of just over a decade ago. Then the multilateral forum, with UK prime minister Gordon Brown in the chair, coordinated a roughly US$1 trillion dollar stimulus package to bolster the global economy at a time of troubles.

Draghi is well aware since then that, while the G20 is widely seen to have seized the mantle from the G7 as the premier forum for international economic cooperation and global governance, it has failed so far to realise the full scale of the ambition some have thrust upon it, in part, because it has no formal mechanisms to ensure enforcement of agreements by world leaders. Moreover, at a time of a continuing global health emergency, there also remains concerns by states outside the club about its legitimacy, and composition given that it was originally selected in the late 1990s by the US along with G7 colleagues. While states were nominally selected according to criteria such as population, GDP and so on, criticism has been made of omissions such as Nigeria, sometimes called the 'giant of Africa', which has three times South Africa's population.

This issue has been picked up by the host of the 2009 summit, Brown, in the context of the coronavirus and he has urged the G20 to work much more closely with the 193 member- state UN to tackle the pandemic. However, important as this issue is, whether the Italian presidency will now deliver on its potential to be one of the most important G20s since 2009 will now depend much more on whether intra-club divisions ameliorate, or grow, in the days ahead.

• The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics