Promising outcomes anticipated at the G20 Rio Summit
Despite ongoing global crises, the Rio Summit is expected to make significant progress in reducing hunger, fostering equality and advancing climate action by prioritising procedural reforms and strategic alliances
On 18–19 November 2024, Brazil will host the G20’s 19th regular annual summit in Rio de Janeiro. It follows the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ meeting on 13–15 November in neighbouring Peru. It will be the first time Brazil has hosted the G20 summit. It will almost complete the G20’s first cycle of every country member hosting, with South Africa to follow in 2025. It will thus continue the four-year sequence of G20 summits hosted by countries from the Global South. After Indonesia in 2022 came a trio of members – India, Brazil and South Africa – from the IBSA summit, and most of the original BRICS of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. All four hosts are democracies. And Brazil’s Rio Summit starts a trio of summits that it will host, adding the expanded BRICS summit and the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Belém, both in 2025.
Brazil’s G20 summit will be chaired by the highly experienced Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was Brazil’s president from 2002 to 2006, was re-elected for a second term from 2006 to 2010 and returned as president for a third term starting on 1 January 2023. Lula noted, during his last election campaign, that he was a founding father of the G20. Indeed, he left the G20 in 2010 as the most loved leader among his G20 colleagues, to return at New Delhi in 2023.
At Rio, Lula will be joined by many G20 veterans. They are led by last year’s chair, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who will be attending his 11th regular annual summit, having participated since 2014, and now backed by another general election victory in May 2024. The other long-serving veterans are Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the European Union’s Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, and, should they attend, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. The relative newcomers will be the United States’ Joe Biden, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and Korea’s Yoon Suk-Yeol. Attending their first G20 summit are Argentina’s Javier Milei, Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto, the United Kingdom’s Keir Starmer, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba, should his party win Japan’s general election on 27 October. Also new is Mauritania’s Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, president of the G20’s new member, the African Union.
The invited eight country guest leaders are Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Singapore’s Lawrence Wong, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Portugal’s Luís Montenegro, Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støre, Angola’s João Manuel Lourenço, Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu and the United Arab Emirates’ Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Also invited will be the heads of 10 multilateral organisations beyond the full G20 members of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. They are the Andean Development Corporation, Food and Agriculture Organization, Inter-American Development Bank, International Labour Organization, New Development Bank, UN, UN Conference on Trade and Development, UNESCO, World Health Organization and World Trade Organization.
These leaders will focus first on the host’s summit theme of ‘Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet’ and its three priorities: social inclusion and the fight against hunger; the energy transition and sustainable development (with economic, social and environmental dimensions); and reform of global governance institutions. Another priority is artificial intelligence.
Leaders will also confront an unprecedented combination of interconnected crises, starting with the climate emergency fuelling record heat and extreme weather events throughout the world. They include elevated inflation, interest rates, debt, energy, food and health insecurity, as well as Russia’s war against Ukraine, China’s actions in Asia, and deadly conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In addressing them, Rio’s leaders will be propelled by the results of the new record of 24 ministerial meetings for 18 different portfolios held from 21 February to 8 November 2024. They are led by those for finance ministers and central bank governors with four plus a joint meeting with health ministers and another with climate ministers, followed by foreign ministers with two, and one each for ministers of development, hunger and poverty, employment, agriculture, digital economy, research and science, tourism, energy transition, climate and environmental sustainability, disaster risk, women’s empowerment, culture, anti-corruption, trade and investment, education and health.
They will also be emboldened by G20 members’ high compliance of 81% by 19 May 2024, with the priority commitments made at the New Delhi Summit last year.
Amid the proliferating global perils and the deep geopolitical divisions among G20 leaders, the Rio Summit promises to deliver a significant performance. Leaders will again transcend their divisions over Russia’s war against Ukraine, and now the Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian war with Israel to agree on a consensus communiqué, as they did at their summits, with Putin absent, in 2022 and 2023.
While Rio may not significantly affect the world’s numerous military conflicts and geopolitical tensions, it will advance its priorities of reducing hunger and poverty, fostering gender and racial equality, supporting Indigenous peoples, improving health, taking climate action, promoting clean energy and establishing rules for artificial intelligence. This progress will come more on process than on product, with the creation of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty and the Task Force for the Global Mobilization Against Climate Change, and procedural reforms at international institutions, rather than delivering major new money or ambitious agreements on climate, food, the economy, development or debt.
This performance will be propelled by very high levels of shock-activated vulnerability from climate change and many other crises, by significant gaps in the response of the IMF, World Bank and UN galaxy, and by significant levels of members’ predominant equalising capability. But it will be constrained by leaders’ lower levels of common principles and practices, domestic political control, and attachment to their G20 club at the hub of a growing network of global summit governance.
