The global climate crisis is exacerbating conflicts, leading to droughts and floods, causing hunger, crises and displacement, especially in the Global South. So climate policy is foreign policy. Jennifer Morgen has been State Secretary at the Federal Foreign Office for more than a year and is responsible for international climate policy. A personality that had surprised observers: because the German-American was the head of Greenpeace, just a year ago she described herself at the SZ climate summit as an “activist with diplomatic skills”.
Morgan has been negotiating at world climate conferences for decades, as a diplomat for a year. At the last UN climate summit, she played a leading role in negotiations on a fund for poor countries suffering climate-related damage and losses. However, the structure of the fund is still open. The World Climate Conference in Dubai in November should bring about progress on this and other controversial points, such as phasing out fossil fuels.
Observers already have low expectations: the preliminary negotiations that recently ended in Bonn did not bring any rapprochement on essential points. How useful are climate summits then?
At the SZ sustainability summit on Wednesday, Jennifer Morgan admitted that the preliminary negotiations in Bonn were “not an easy preparatory round”. From their point of view, the climate summits were still worthwhile for two reasons. On the one hand, a multilateral approach is needed to make progress. The world climate conferences also gave vulnerable states a place at the negotiating table. On the other hand, the summits are formats in which heads of state and government feel the public pressure.
According to Jennifer Morgan, China has a special role to play: “The Chinese want to work with Germany. They know that building new coal-fired power plants is not a long-term solution,” she said. From her point of view also a German success: “We managed to get China to say: We are ready to do more, to create more ambitions, to accelerate our energy transition. That’s new.”