Michael Jacobs outlines UK G20 priorities on AI, food, climate

Last UK G20 presidency in 2009 produced $5tn fiscal stimulus

Jacobs, writing in the Guardian’s opinion section, set out the four priorities the British government should pursue when it chairs the G20. He framed the G20 presidency as a major foreign-policy responsibility for the incoming government, even as the new prime minister has indicated he wants to concentrate on domestic policy.

The 2009 London summit, the last time the UK chaired the forum, offers a measure of what the G20 can achieve. According to Jacobs, then-prime minister Brown secured agreement on a $5tn fiscal stimulus among G20 member states, expanded International Monetary Fund lending to developing countries, and created the Financial Stability Board to coordinate global financial regulation. At an April 2009 press appearance, then-US president Barack Obama told French president Nicolas Sarkozy — who had said “none of us has a plan” — that “Gordon has a plan,” Jacobs recounted.

The 2009 outcome has rarely been repeated. The G20’s annual leaders’ summits typically produce lengthy communiqués reflecting “lowest-common-denominator agreement on broad principles,” Jacobs wrote, and the body “rarely commits its members to doing anything they were not planning to do anyway.” The 2020 agreement to suspend developing-country debt during the Covid pandemic, followed by a “common framework” for debt treatment, was one of the few exceptions, he noted.

The institution’s structural weakness compounds the problem. The G20, Jacobs wrote, is “an oddly weak institution” for what is meant to be the effective executive committee of the global economy. The group has 19 member countries plus the European Union and the African Union, but no permanent headquarters, no staff, and no standing website. Public records of the body’s agreements, he observed, are maintained as unofficial webpages by academics at the University of Toronto.

The 2026 US-hosted summit illustrates the limits. President Donald Trump boycotted last year’s G20 summit, and the December 2026 leaders’ meeting is scheduled for a Trump property near Miami. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, who hosted the previous summit, “was glad simply to get any kind of agreed communique,” Jacobs wrote. With the US hosting this year, he wrote, one should “expect a show of personal and US power and very little attempt to achieve anything by way of multilateral cooperation.”

That makes the 2027 British presidency more important, not less, Jacobs argued. The UK, he wrote, “needs to show that it is still possible for the world’s leading nations — including the US and China — to work together to meet the key challenges facing the world.”

He proposed four specific priorities.

First, the G20 should pursue a global treaty on artificial intelligence regulation. After “recent alarm over the existential risks of AI,” the UK has a chance to lead the world toward a binding agreement on AI control, Jacobs wrote. Even if Trump is unwilling to sign up, securing the participation of the rest of the world — what Jacobs called a form of global “technological security” — would be a “vital achievement,” and “a future US president might well wish to accede later,” he suggested.

Second, the G20 should acknowledge the growing risk to food security. An incoming “supersized” El Niño weather pattern is combining with the climate crisis, soil and biodiversity loss, and the war in the Middle East’s impact on diesel and fertilizer costs to create “a perfect storm for the world’s food system,” Jacobs wrote. Agricultural yields are falling and food prices are rising, leaving millions of people at risk of hunger, he warned.

Third, the G20 should commit to coordinated climate resilience measures. The Trump administration does not support emissions reduction but does accept the need to adapt to climate change, Jacobs noted, and this year’s extreme weather events have “impressed on all governments how urgent this is.” The G20 should agree to provide more support to the most vulnerable countries, he wrote.

Fourth, the G20 should agree to a debt restructuring programme for low- and middle-income economies whose debt, “through no fault of their own, but because of rising global interest rates, has now become unsustainable,” Jacobs wrote. The Federal Reserve’s effective federal funds rate stood at 3.75 percent in the most recent monthly average, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data, providing one measure of the higher-rate environment he describes. The compounding of debt burdens with rising energy and food prices has made sustainable economic growth “all but impossible” for many of these countries, he wrote.

What connects these four issues, Jacobs wrote, is that “all are global problems that can only be tackled through international cooperation.” They each address aspects of national and global security — technological, food, climate and economic, in his framing. The first three, he wrote, address problems that are highly visible and politically salient to the British public, enabling the government to demonstrate how international action benefits people at home; the fourth, he wrote, represents a vital contribution to global economic growth. And all four, he wrote, have a good chance of being agreed in the G20, despite the conflicts and tensions that in other areas divide the world’s leaders.

Jacobs suggested a presidential slogan to match the priorities. G20 host countries typically adopt a slogan to express their ambitions, and in other contexts the prime minister has said he wants to give people “a sense of hope.” For the G20, Jacobs proposed, the slogan might be “national security through international cooperation.” It would, he wrote, be “not a bad legacy to aim for.”

Jacobs is professor of political economy at the University of Sheffield and a former energy and climate change adviser to Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, according to the column’s byline.