FOCUS on: G20 Summit One Year On, Countries face a new opportunity with November summit in Brazil

Andrew Travis

Staff Writer

International preparations for the G20 2024 summit in Brazil are underway, as the summit is set to expand for the first time since its foundation in 1999. The African Union (AU) will join this year and represent 55 African countries at the summit after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced their inclusion at last year’s G20 summit in India, according to BBC. 

The G20 countries are preparing to meet in different cities across Brazil in November to discuss the most pressing economic, political, and environmental issues in the world today. The 2023 summit was a success for India. As the host, it was able to solidify itself on the world stage, according to Daiji World. However, lasting commitment to G20 resolutions has been hard to come by. BBC reported that China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin declined to attend in 2023, instead sending diplomats in their place.  

Since 1999, the G20 has been a group of the world’s economic powerhouses. The “twenty” comprise 85 percent of the world’s GDP and 75 percent of the world’s trade. Alongside the European Union (EU), the other 19 countries include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK, and the U.S. Although the group was founded in 1999, the first official summit wasn’t held until after the financial crisis of 2008 in an attempt to promote international cooperation. Since 2008, the summit has been hosted in a different country each year, with the host country acting as the summit president and guiding the agenda. 

India took charge this past summit, according to the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), setting an aggressive agenda to address a plethora of issues while also making it the most inclusive in G20 history. With the engagement of over 67 million people across the summit, officials, grassroots community leaders, corporate entities, educators, women, and youth came together across more than 100 events for the summit last year. The commitments to reform and new action were vast. 

The summit recommitted to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by funding high-level principles to accelerate progress. According to the ORF, the countries committed to securing $1.2 trillion for SDG funding by 2030 and pledged $500 billion annually to stimulate SDG progress.  The summit’s Green Development Pact called for significant increases in climate financing for the Global South. The Pact set a target to mobilize $5.9 trillion for clean energy technologies and climate adaptation efforts before 2030. At the summit, the G20 nations also committed to bridging the global digital divide by developing and sharing public digital infrastructure, with a framework established for global digital infrastructure sharing. 

The G20 also endorsed a call for reforming multilateral financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to enhance representation and input from developing countries. They called for increasing concessional lending for developing nations and boosting capital at institutions like the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), a smaller institution focusing on developing countries. The G20 summit also proved to be a place for economic diplomacy between the member states. According to Reuters, the U.S., India, Saudi Arabia, and the EU reached a trade agreement at the summit to counter China’s trade influence globally through its Belt and Road Initiative. The deal laid the groundwork for increased trade and infrastructure between the countries and increased trade flow from Asia and Europe through the Middle East. 

These commitments, including reforms like opening the summit to the AU, promise a better and more sustainable global economic order. However, the G20 has also faced challenges on more pressing political matters, as well as countries not committing to pledges they signed on to at the summit. 

According to The Guardian, countries are not sticking to the pledges to transition away from fossil fuels. Countries like Saudi Arabia have attempted to reinterpret the phrasing of the agreements and avoid using terminology like “fossil fuels.” The leaders of the G20 also walked away from the summit without a consensus on the war in Ukraine, according to BBC. Without Ukraine being a party to the summit and Russia having a solid presence at the G20, the G20 did not directly criticize Russia in their joint declaration on the situation in Ukraine. 

As the world looks toward the new G20 summit in Brazil, countries will have to grapple with emerging problems and issues that have remained unanswered since the last summit. With new conflicts emerging and expanding in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine showing no signs of slowing down, the summit will allow consensus and diplomacy to take center stage. The opportunity for change will be ripe, but it is up to the G20 summit countries to commit to following through on the pledges they make at a summit like the G20 in Brazil.

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