It’s Earth Day Wednesday, but the Earth is fixated on coronavirus and not climate change.

That’s got to change, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned in his message to the world, calling on efforts to exit from the economic catastrophe of the pandemic to be tightly tied to the long-term push to avoid the direst consequences of climate change.

Calling coronavirus “the biggest test the world has faced since the Second World War,” Guterres added: “We must act decisively to protect our planet from both the coronavirus and the existential threat of climate disruption."

That message comes as the pandemic has thrown climate diplomacy into disarray. The global corps of climate negotiators, who would normally be flying from meeting to meeting by this time of year, are at home watching a trickle of low-importance webinars.

But the next few months could be decisive for climate efforts decades into the future. The U.K., the EU and their allies are scrambling for a strategy to influence the destination of trillions of euros of recovery cash that could either curb emissions or supercharge them. That’s raising tensions with poorer countries worried about being frozen out of aid packages they need to decarbonize.

“There are strong forces that will tend toward reassertion of business as usual” — Pete Betts, former lead climate negotiator for the U.K. and the EU

Inside the EU, the recovery effort has set off a mad rush of lobbying as industries like autos and aviation scream for bailout cash while pushing for the EU to roll back potentially expensive environmental legislation.

“There are strong forces that will tend toward reassertion of business as usual,” said Pete Betts, former lead climate negotiator for the U.K. and the EU. “So it will need active leadership and cooperation to seize the moment and prevent that from happening.”

The EU can provide “de facto leadership,” said Betts, if it embraces a green recovery plan.

That idea is gaining traction.

Last week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for "doubling down on our growth strategy by investing in the European Green Deal."

Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans reiterated that appeal on Tuesday, saying that as Europe battles the coronavirus it should not “be under the illusion that the climate crisis and biodiversity loss goes away.”

But there are deep splits within the EU — especially from poorer and coal-dependent Central European members — which hamper the bloc’s efforts to put forward a united front on climate change.

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “The EU must lead the way for a green and just recovery, and reach out to China and others to align responses with global climate commitments."

But the body blows of the pandemic have upended the world’s economic order, making such diplomacy more difficult.

China’s economy shrank 6.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020. If the country tries to meet its goal of 6 percent growth for the year “it will entail investment into heavy industries and creative accounting,” said Li Shuo, an analyst with Greenpeace East Asia.

But EU leverage over the world’s biggest polluter — never strong — just got weaker. Two summits, which had been planned for this year to “reset” the EU-China relationship and billed as the EU’s moment to strike a climate partnership with China, may now be delayed due to safety.

Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Teresa Ribera said the EU had “made it very clear” at last week’s G20 finance meeting that recoveries must be “climate sound.” Getting that message heard proved tough, she said, with many members in the throes of the pandemic and the Saudi G20 presidency “mainly focused on how to get a predictable and stable price for oil.”

But Europe has a handy bully pulpit. The U.K. and Italy are the hosts of this year’s global COP26 climate talks, which were supposed to be held in Glasgow in November, but have been pushed to 2021. In a quirk of planning, the presidencies of the G20 and the G7, currently held by Saudi Arabia and the U.S., will pass to Italy and the U.K. next year.

Conversational conundrum

The EU and its allies face several challenges. One is fundamental: COVID-19 has closed down the spaces in which deal-making normally occurs. The diplomatic calendar for 2020 is awash with cancellations.

A summit hosted this week by the alliance of small island states is now virtual, limiting political discussions. Still, the countries most vulnerable to climate change hope the meeting will show why leaders “must contemplate how we can be better prepared, be far more resilient, to weather the storm of another shock to our global system,” said Janine Felson, Belize ambassador to the U.N. “It is coming and for us ... it is already here.”

“Preparation towards COP26 must happen in other places,” Ribera, who is also Spain’s minister for the ecological transition, said, urging the European Commission to update its climate diplomacy mandate. “The Europeans must take advantage of all financial and development fora to strengthen their references [to a green recovery].”

North-South splits

But old fault lines between rich and poor countries will be strained by any move to attach green strings to virus-related relief. Some developing nations have traditionally been suspicious of the green agenda, said Anju Sharma, head of policy at the European Capacity Building Initiative, because of a “deep-seated (and not entirely illegitimate) fear that the green agenda is being prioritized over development needs by the north.”

Developing country diplomats have raised eyebrows at national stimulus packages in Europe and elsewhere that run into the hundreds of billions or even trillions of euros. They have fought for years to get rich countries to fulfill a pledge to collectively deliver $100 billion a year in climate-related finance.

Mohamed Nasr, who negotiates climate finance on behalf of African countries, said: "It just confirms what we have been saying, the money is there, please don’t come and say it is difficult to raise this amount of money when you are asking developing countries or African countries to take transformative decisions.”

Many poor countries say their future emissions cuts are dependent on that support.

“There’s no herd immunity from climate change,” one developing country negotiator told a meeting the U.K. COP26 presidency hosted at the U.N. in New York in early March.

Nasr said the general push for a green recovery was welcome, but piling green conditions on to COVID-19 relief funding would not help poor countries struggling under the added burden of the virus.

The second major headache for those hoping for a green bloom is the unravelling of multilateralism in the face of the virus. International institutions, particularly the U.N., were built to guide the world through crises. But the pandemic so far has been a disordered, every-country-for-itself scramble to secure protective equipment, hurl blame and unilaterally block trade and movement. The World Health Organization has been scapegoated, and U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. would stop funding the U.N. body.

This might have been a “reset moment,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School of International Affairs and former U.N. special envoy for sustainable energy, to “rebuild the way international institutions work together [and] reset national recovery plans so they are on track with a 1.5C world. But with the cast of characters that we have, that is simply beyond us.”

Amid the collapse of global organizations there is little sign of a coordinated approach to the post-virus recovery, said Kyte. “I see a temerity in leadership and these are the moonshot moments.”

Perhaps most crucial to the long-term future of climate diplomacy is that the influx of cash might stretch the debilitating divide between the climate vanguard and the laggards.

As countries search for ways to spend, those with “well-established plans for low carbon infrastructure and policy frameworks to deliver it will naturally be able to ramp up more quickly,” said Chris Stark, chief executive of the U.K.’s Committee on Climate Change. The U.K., which last year passed a law mandating net zero carbon emissions by 2050, has a “long list of infrastructure projects ready to go.”

Incumbency and history might push others away from cleaner investments. In those countries “the economy that comes out of the crisis could be locked for decades into an unsustainable pathway,” said Sébastien Treyer, executive director of the French sustainable development think tank IDDRI.

In Australia, coal prices are rising and mines have been exempted from national lockdown laws in the expectation they will feed the economic recovery in Asia. Poland has called for an exemption from the EU Emissions Trading System in order to redirect money to supporting businesses and workers.

World Bank economists Stéphane Hallegatte and Stephen Hammer said a lack of good-to-go big green infrastructure projects need not force countries to back polluting industries. Many jobs could be created in restoring wetlands, improving city drains, creating bike lanes and any number of innovative, beneficial projects. With many countries in lockdown and the economic recovery blitz still not fully under way, the next months are crucial to plan those steps.

Again, it comes down to enlightened leadership, Betts said. “It’s there but it’s got to be fought for, it’s got to be argued for. It’s not going to happen on its own.”

This article has been updated with comment from Mohamed Nasr.

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