The G-7’s rich democracies failed to make any significant progress on climate during a summit in Italy, instead reiterating their previous commitments, experts and activists said on Friday.

“G7 leaders could have stayed home. No new commitments were made,” said Frederique Roeder, vice president of Global Citizen.

The leaders meeting in Puglia reaffirmed a pledge made by their environment ministers in April to “phase out unabated coal power generation in our energy systems during the first half of the 2030s.”

But they left some wiggle room: Countries could commit to phasing it out “in line with countries’ net-zero pathways, while keeping the 1.5°C temperature rise limit within reach,” according to the final statement.

“The G7 plan to phase out coal to stay below 1.5°C is too little, too late, and gas is neither cheap nor a bridge to a safe climate,” said Tracey Carty, a Greenpeace climate politics expert.

The G-7 groups make up about 38 percent of the global economy and were responsible for 21 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, according to the Climate Analytics Policy Institute.

Nicola Flamignani of climate-focused communications firm GSCC said the group, which accounts for about 30 percent of fossil fuel production, has “left the door open for continued public investment in gas.”

Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States also stressed the need to agree on a new post-2025 climate financing target, to which they would be leading contributors – but again, this was nothing new.

no proof

Dozens of climate protesters picketed outside the G7 media centre in Bari, wearing T-shirts depicting an olive tree in flames erupting from the red-hot Mediterranean Sea.

Europe is the fastest warming continent and the Mediterranean Sea is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events caused by climate change, from droughts to floods.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose hard-right government voted against the European Green Deal, told the summit that climate change needed to be tackled “without ideological approaches”.

But activists charged that the attendance of the CEO of Italian oil and gas giant ENI at a leaders’ roundtable on Africa, energy and climate showed how closely Rome’s political and fossil fuel interests are entangled.

“There is no evidence that gas meets people’s needs in Africa better and cheaper than clean energy and widespread electrification,” Luca Bergamaschi, co-founder of the ECCO think tank, told AFP.

“On the contrary, gas investments in Africa have a negative impact on public budgets and are a major factor in exacerbating the debt crisis,” he said.

Experts also pointed to the G7’s lack of commitment to remain a leading contributor to the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA), which helps African countries fight climate change.

half cooked

The G-7 announced a new Energy for Development initiative in Africa, launched with a number of countries from Ivory Coast to Ethiopia and Kenya, but did not say what – if any – funding it would provide.

It also unveiled the Apulia Food Systems Initiative – the G7’s fourth major food security initiative in 15 years – as part of a G7 effort to tackle the root causes of unwanted migration.

Nga Celestin, permanent secretary of the Regional Forum of Farmers’ Organisations in Central Africa (PROPAC), said it was an “incomplete” initiative that would not succeed without involving family farmers.

Africa’s small farmers produce 70 per cent of the continent’s food, according to the United Nations, and experts say previous G7 initiatives have failed because of a failure to include them.

The ONE Campaign criticised the G7’s “nonsense in Puglia”, and executive director David McNair said “this year’s summit completely missed the mark.”