Boris Johnson struggled to present an agreement by G7 world leaders in Cornwall as a breakthrough matching the scale of the crises facing the globe.
The final communique of the rich nations’ club contained no early timetable to eradicate coal-fired emissions, offered only 1bn extra vaccines for the world’s poor over the next 12 months, and made no new binding commitments to challenge China’s human rights abuses.
Green groups and anti-poverty campaigners expressed profound disappointment at the failure to attach new cash to the communique’s aspirations aimed at ending the pandemic, “building back better” and saving the world from imminent climate catastrophe.
British officials said the task of a G7 summit was to set out a policy roadmap rather than make binding, detailed financial commitments, which are more likely to be made at the G20 or at the UN climate change summit in November.
The former UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, said the G7 will be remembered “only for a colossal failure to honour Boris Johnston’s promise to vaccinate the world, an unforgivable moral failure when Covid is destroying lives at the rate of one-third of a million every month”. . He echoed the view of the World Health Organization, that the G7 had needed to commit to distribute 11bn vaccines, and not just 1bn. He said he was disappointed the G7 did not support compulsory patent transfers to boost production in Africa.
But Johnson, at a closing press conference, said he hoped the summit lived up to the optimistic hopes and predictions, adding he knew “the world was looking to us to reject some of the selfishness and the nationalistic approaches that marred the initial early responses to the pandemic, and channel all our economic and scientific might into defeating Covid”.
He rejected Brown’s criticisms, saying the G7 had set a target to vaccinate the whole world by the end of the year. He said of the 1.5bn vaccines around the world, 500m were due to the deal signed by the UK government with Oxford/AstraZeneca.
President Joe Biden, insisting that America was back at the table, said the US might be able to find a further 1bn next year, adding that fighting pandemics “may be a constant project for a long time”.
But the One campaign said the G7 had been set clear targets by the WHO and the other major multilateral bodies ahead of the summit, which it had not met. At the weekend, the WHO called for 70% of the global population to be vaccinated by time of the G7’s next summit in Germany next year. But One said the money would only “provide enough doses to vaccinate around 200 million people, 5.4% of the total population of these countries, by the end of the year. By the next G7 summit only 10.3% of the population in low and medium income countries would be vaccinated by this deal.”
Johnson also came under attack over the weak commitments on the climate crisis, with green groups saying the G7 had agreed “to plan to make a plan”. Johnson said the entire G7 was committed to the net zero emissions target by 2050, and had made significant steps towards the pledge of $100bn a year in climate finance for developing countries, a claim challenged by aid agencies.
On coal, the communique recognised that continued global investment in unabated coal power generation is incompatible with keeping 1.5C within reach, and committed to end new direct government support for unabated international thermal coal power generation by the end of 2021.
On China, the US, unable to secure a G7 consensus, put a separate statement on the use of forced labour in Xinjiang. The final communique made reference to keeping the Taiwan Strait open, the loss of democracy in Hong Kong and “called on China to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially in relation to Xinjiang”. Through the summit some G7 leaders, notably Germany, cautioned against alienating China at a time when Beijing’s help is needed to tackle climate change.
Biden defended the commitments, adding: “We are in a contest not with China per se but with autocrats around the world, and whether democracies can compete them in a rapidly changing world.” He called for a further inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, saying “it is important to know if this is due to a trial that went awry in a laboratory. We have not had access to their laboratories.”
Johnson added that his official advice was it was unlikely that the virus spread from a leak in a Chinese lab, but he said that “anyone sensible would keep an open mind about it”.
Asked about him being more ideologically in tune with Donald Trump than Biden, Johnson claimed that there were ideological similarities between his plans to level up and the infrastructure programme of the Democrats.
But the summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, will probably be remembered less for its specific commitments than as a collective relaunch of multilateralism, the return of in-person diplomacy after a near two-year hiatus, and the departure of Trump’s chaotic style that effectively brought the G7 to a standstill.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, praised Biden, saying he had brought “new momentum” to the G7’s efforts to tackle global challenges.
“It’s not like the world no longer has any problems because of the election of Joe Biden as US president,” Merkel told reporters. “But we can work on solutions to those problems with new momentum. And I think it’s very good that we have become more concrete at this G7.”
