The last G7 summit was a waste of resources. If the meeting was to take place at all, it would have to be conducted online, saving time, logistics costs and aircraft emissions. But more importantly, the G7 summits are an anachronism. Political leaders need to stop wasting energy on an exercise that is not representative of today's global economy and results in an almost complete disconnect between these goals and the means adopted to achieve them.

There was absolutely nothing at the G7 summit that could not be achieved much cheaper, easier and routinely through Zoom. The most useful diplomatic meeting this year was President Joe Biden's online meeting with 40 world leaders in April to discuss climate change. Routine international meetings of politicians, parliamentarians, scholars and activists are important. They normalize the international debate.

Why G7 and not G20 ?!

But why should such discussions arise within the G7, which is a replacement for the G20? When the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) began their annual meetings in the 1970s, they dominated the world economy. In 1980, they accounted for 51% of world GDP (measured by international prices), while developing countries in Asia accounted for only 8,8%. In 2021, the G7 countries will produce only 31% of world GDP, while the same Asian countries will produce 32,9%.

The G20, including China, India, Indonesia and other major developing countries, accounts for about 81% of world output and balances the interests of high-income and emerging economies. The model is not perfect, as it leaves out smaller and poorer countries and the African Union (AU) should be added as a member, but at least the G20 offers a fruitful format for discussing global topics covering much of the world economy. After all, the annual EU-US summit could achieve much of what the G7 originally intended to cover.

The G7 is particularly irrelevant because its leaders are not living up to their promises. They want to make symbolic statements, not solve problems. Worse, they give the impression of solving global problems, while really leaving them to deteriorate. In that sense, this year's summit was no different from the previous ones.

For example: Vaccines

Take Covid-19 vaccines, for example. G7 leaders set a goal of vaccinating at least 60% of the global population. They also promised to share 870 million doses directly over the next year, which is estimated to be enough for 435 million fully immunized people (two doses per person). But 60% of the global population of 4,7 billion people means approximately ten times more than promised.

The G7 leaders did not offer any plan to achieve the stated goal of global coverage and, in fact, did not develop any, although it would not be difficult to do. The estimate of the monthly production of each vaccine is clear, and the efficient distribution of those doses to all countries is entirely feasible.

One reason why such a plan has not yet been developed is that the US government has so far refused to sit down with Russian and Chinese leaders to devise such a global distribution. Another reason is that the G7 governments have allowed vaccine manufacturers to negotiate privately and secretly, instead of being part of a global plan. Perhaps the third reason is that the G7 looked at global goals without thinking enough about the needs of each recipient country.

Or: Climate change

Another example of false promises by the G7 is climate change. At the last summit, G7 leaders rightly accepted the goal of global decarbonisation by 2050 and called on developing countries to do the same. However, instead of establishing a funding plan that would allow developing countries to achieve that goal, they reiterated the financial commitment first made in 2009, which was never fulfilled. "We reaffirm the collective goals of each of the developed countries," they reaffirmed, "to jointly mobilize $ 100 billion a year from public and private sources by 2025 in the context of significant mitigation and transparency activities in implementing [the measures]."

It is difficult to overestimate the cynicism of this often repeated commitment. Wealthy countries missed their own deadline of 2020 to secure the long-promised $ 100 billion a year - just 0,2% of rich countries' annual GDP. And the promised $ 100 billion is just a small part of what developing countries need to decarbonize and adapt to climate change.

And global education?

The disparity between the goals set by the G7 and scarce resources is also visible in the field of education. Hundreds of millions of children in poor countries do not have access to primary and secondary education because their governments do not have the funds to provide teachers, classrooms and educational materials. In 2020, UNESCO estimated that low- and lower-middle-income countries need about $ 504 billion a year by 2030 to ensure all children complete secondary education, but have only about $ 356 billion in domestic resources, leaving financially a gap of about $ 148 billion a year.

And what does the G7 propose in this year's communiqué? The leaders are proposing "a goal to bring 40 million more girls into education with the support of at least $ 2,75 billion for the Global Education Partnership." These are not serious numbers. They have been pulled out of the hat and will leave hundreds of millions of children out of school despite the world's strong commitment (set out in the Global Sustainable Development Goal No. 4) to universal secondary education. Large-scale solutions are available - such as mobilizing low-interest finance from multilateral development banks - but G7 leaders have not proposed such solutions.

My recommendations

The problems in the world are too urgent to be left to empty promises and measures that are just a hint of what is needed to achieve these goals. If politics is a mere spectacle of posing for cameras, the G7 summit might make sense. However, global needs are urgent: to end the pandemic, to clean up the energy system, to take children to school, and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

My recommendations: fewer personal meetings, more serious homework to link resources and goals, more routine ZUM meetings to discuss what really needs to be done, and more reliance on the G20 (plus the African Union) as a group that can, in fact, deliver. We need Asia, Africa and Latin America at the table for any real global solution.

Taken from Project Syndicate