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Commentary

Following the Money at Ise-Shima

Brittaney Warren, Researcher, G7 Research Group
May 26, 2016

G7 leaders are going into their first day of meetings at the Ise-Shima Summit with pledges to support global initiatives already made. Among the issues supported are climate change, empowering women and girls, regional security and global deadly pandemics. On the latter the G7 host Japan is leading. They were the first to make a pledge, committing $50 million, to a new financing mechanism and insurance market launched by the World Bank on May 21 to combat and protect against infectious diseases. Canada is also dedicating itself to fighting disease. On May 10, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would increase its investment in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by $785 million over the course of three years.

Humanitarian causes are high on the agenda for Canada in the wake of the United Nations World Humanitarian Summit held on May 24 in Istanbul, Turkey. Canada's Minister of International Development and La Francophonie Marie-Claude Bibeau announced a $331.5 million pledge in humanitarian aid. The financial assistance will be help fight persistent gender inequalities. Bibeau stated that women and girls "are at the heart of Canada's humanitarian response."

Leaders have also expressed their concern over the far-reaching impacts of regional insecurity, as well as climate change and its accompanying natural disasters. Here, as a victim of the recent earthquake in Kyushu, Japan is also showing leadership with a pledge of $4 billion between 2015 and 2018 for disaster risk reduction made at the World Humanitarian Summit. In regards to security, Japan has earmarked $6 billion to combat terrorism in the Middle East with some of the money dedicated to supporting refugees and internally displaced people in the region.

Tracking contributions to these key issues in the lead-up to the G7 summit provides a clue to what issues matter most to which leaders and to what will likely be prioritized in the final declaration.

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Brittaney Warren is a researcher with the G7 and G8 Research Group, the G20 Research Group and the BRICS Research Group, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs in Trinity College at the University of Toronto. She has worked in Spain and in Peru where she conducted field research on a sustainable development project with women living in extreme poverty. She has conducted research on the compliance of CARICOM members with their summit commitments on non-communicable diseases. Brittaney leads the social media strategy and marketing program for the G7 and G20 Research Groups' books and works on climate change, and was the lead researcher on an e-book project on "Delivering Sustainable Energy Access." Follow her at @brittaneywarren.

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