WASHINGTON — Global finance chiefs will gather in Washington this week amid intense uncertainty over wars in the Middle East and Europe, a flagging Chinese economy and worries that a coin-toss US presidential election could ignite new trade battles and erode multilateral cooperation.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meetings are scheduled to draw more than 10,000 people from finance ministries, central banks and civil society groups to discuss efforts to boost patchy global growth, deal with debt distress and finance the green energy transition.

But the elephant in the meeting rooms will be the potential for a Nov. 5 election victory by U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to upend the international economic system with massive new US tariffs and borrowing and a shift away from climate cooperation.

“Arguably the most important issue for the global economy —the outcome of the US election — is not on the official agenda this week, but it’s on everyone’s mind,” said Josh Lipsky, a former IMF official who now heads the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.

The election “has huge implications on trade policy, on the future of the dollar, on who the next Federal Reserve chair is going to be, and all of those impact every country in the world,” he added.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, is largely expected to continue the Biden administration’s resumption of multilateral cooperation on climate, tax and debt relief issues if she wins next month’s vote.

The meetings, which start on Monday and get into full swing later in the week, will likely be the last for US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who spearheaded much of the Biden administration’s multilateral economic and climate efforts. Ms. Yellen has said she is “probably done” with public service at the end of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s term in office in January.

But growing anti-China trade sentiment and industrial policy plans from wealthy countries, punctuated by the Biden administration’s steep tariff increases on Chinese electric vehicles, semiconductors and solar products, is expected to be a key discussion topic at the meetings.

LACKLUSTER GROWTH
The IMF will update its global growth forecasts on Tuesday. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva last week flagged a lackluster outlook, saying the world, saddled by high debts, was headed for slow medium-term growth, and pointing to a “difficult future.”

Still, Ms. Georgieva said she was “not super-pessimistic” about the outlook, given pockets of resilience, notably in the US and India that are offsetting continued weakness in China and Europe.

While debt defaults among poor countries may have peaked, participants at the annual meetings are expected to discuss the growing problem of scarce liquidity that is forcing some emerging markets saddled with high debt service costs to delay development investments as overseas aid shrinks.

Last year’s IMF and World Bank annual meetings got underway in Morocco as the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and unleashing conflicts with a death toll of more than 40,000 Gazans, according to Palestinian health authorities.

The economic damage has been largely limited to economies in or adjacent to the conflict: Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.

“If there was to be an escalation that puts at risk oil and gas delivery, that could have much more significant spillover for the world economy,” Ms. Georgieva told Reuters in an interview.

Support for Ukraine also will be a major topic at the meetings, as the G7 wealthy democracies aim to reach a political agreement by the end of October for a $50-billion loan for the Eastern European country backed by frozen Russian sovereign assets. The loan in part is seen as a financial bulwark against a Trump victory next month, as the former US president has threatened to “get out of Ukraine.”

Despite the wall of worry, World Bank and IMF officials intend to spend the week concentrating on the work at hand at the meetings, which coincide with the 80^th anniversary of the institutions’ founding in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.

For World Bank President Ajay Banga, that means finding ways to speed up the preparations of projects to use the bank’s expanded lending capacity and refining a new scorecard aimed at improving development outcomes.

“The world is the world right now. And rather than use the meetings to go over what we already seem to know — which is to admire the problem — I’d like to take the annual meetings to doing something about what we can do as institutions,” Mr. Banga told reporters last week. — Reuters

KYIV — The US military has rushed its advanced anti-missile system to Israel and it is now “in place,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.

THAAD, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, is a critical part of the US military’s layered air defense systems and adds to Israel’s already formidable anti-missile defenses.

“The THAAD system is in place,” Mr. Austin said, speaking to reporters before his arrival in Ukraine on Monday.

He declined to say whether it was operational, but added: “We have the ability to put it into operation very quickly and we’re on pace with our expectations.”

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. said the THAAD’s deployment, along with about 100 US soldiers, was meant to help defend Israel, which is weighing an expected retaliation against Iran after Tehran fired more than 180 missiles at Israel on Oct 1.

The United States has been urging Israel to calibrate its response to avoid triggering a broader war in the Middle East, officials say, with Mr. Biden publicly voicing his opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites and his concerns about a strike on its energy infrastructure.

Responding to questions from reporters, Mr. Biden said last week he had a good understanding of when and how Israel would attack Iran. But he also said he saw an opportunity to end the two enemies’ back-and-forth strikes.

Mr. Austin was cautious.

“It’s hard to say exactly what that (Israel’s) strike will look like,” Mr. Austin told reporters.

“At the end of the day, that’s an Israeli decision, and whether or not the Israelis believe it’s proportional and how the Iranians perceive it, I mean those may be two different things.”

“We’re going to do — continue to do — everything we can… to dial down the tensions and hopefully get both parties to begin to de-escalate.  So, we’ll see what happens,” he added. — Reuters

THE WORLD in 2022 reached its most ambitious deal ever to halt the destruction of nature by decade’s end.

Two years later, countries are already behind on meeting their goals.

As nearly 200 nations were scheduled to meet on Monday for a two-week United Nations (UN) biodiversity summit, Conference of the Parties (COP16), in Cali, Colombia, they will be under pressure to prove their support for the goals laid out in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreement.

A top concern for countries and companies is how to pay for conservation, with the COP16 talks aiming to develop new initiatives that could generate revenues for nature.

“We have a problem here,” said Gavin Edwards, director of the nonprofit Nature Positive.

“COP16 is an opportunity to re-energize and remind everybody of their commitments two years ago and start to course correct if we’re going to get anywhere close to 2030 targets being achieved,” Mr. Edwards said.

The rate of nature destruction through activities like logging or overfishing has not let up, while governments miss deadlines on their biodiversity action plans and funding for conservation is billions of dollars away from meeting a 2025 goal.

The summit in Colombia, marking the 16^th meeting of nations that signed the original 1992 Convention on Biodiversity, is set to be the largest biodiversity summit to date, with some 23,000 delegates registered to participate as well as a large exhibition area open to the public.

Whether the participation and pressure can push countries for bolder conservation actions remains to be seen.

The clearest sign of lagging efforts is the fact that most countries have yet to submit national conservation plans, known officially as National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), though they had agreed to do so by the start of COP16.

As of Friday, 31 out of 195 countries had filed a plan to the UN biodiversity secretariat.

Richer nations have been quicker to file with many European nations, Australia, Japan, China, South Korea and Canada having filed their plans.

The United States attends the talks but never ratified the Convention on Biodiversity, so is not obligated to submit a plan.

Another 73 countries as of Friday had opted to only file a less ambitious submission that sets out their national targets, without details of how they would be achieved.

With so few plans filed, experts will likely struggle to gauge progress in meeting the agreement’s hallmark “30 by 30” goal of preserving 30% of the land and sea by 2030.

Colombia’s Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, who also serves as COP16’s president, said that while the summit needs to assess the plans submitted so far, it must also look to address why so many others are late.

“It could be that the funds are not enough, for example, to be able to produce the plans,” Ms. Muhamad told Reuters. Countries with newly elected governments also may still be getting up to speed, she said.

Poorer countries have had a harder time finding the funding and expertise needed to develop national biodiversity plans, said the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) advocacy chief Bernadette Fischler Hooper.

MONEY FOR NATURE
Beyond getting countries to commit to conservation policies and plans, a top priority for the COP16 summit is finding new funding sources for poorer nations to meet nature goals.

During the COP15 talks in 2022, negotiators set a goal for $20 billion annually by 2025 to help developing countries on biodiversity.

That is not much more than the $15.4 billion per year that was already flowing for nature by 2022, according to OECD data published in September. While that makes the 2025 target more achievable, it also means the target could have been more ambitious.

“If you’re just looking at new money that’s been announced since (COP15) to implement this framework, it’s pretty thin,” said Brian O’Donnell of the Campaign for Nature advocacy group.

Because there is a two-year lag in the data, countries will not learn how much is being spent on nature this year until after the goal kicks in.

The world moved quickly after the COP15 deal to set up a new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund within months.

The fund was envisioned as one of the world’s principal instruments to pay for conservation, aiming to raise billions in dollars.

But few countries have since contributed, with only $238 million collected so far, according to data compiled by Campaign for Nature.

Ms. Muhamad said that, amid the financing conversation and policy reviews, negotiators need to keep their sights on the real-world nature crisis unfolding.

She has also urged nations to consider their plans for tackling climate change as part of their biodiversity agenda, given that the two are interlinked. For example, global warming has heated the oceans to unprecedented levels, with the world experiencing its fourth mass bleaching event this year.

“The final indicator really is what’s the reality of biodiversity loss,” she said. “We are not better off now than we were two years ago.” — Reuters