Towards a New Green World | Climate, trade and development: Economic resilience for the Global South in a warming world

November 07, 2025

We need to reinvent the climate agenda for the Global South. Calling for decarbonisation without economic resilience is no longer viable. In this series, we highlight the climate, trade, and development link, and ask how countries of the Global South can participate and stay afloat in the new, green economy.

In this overview paper, Sunita Narain analyses the geopolitical context in which change is being demanded. She calls for a bold reset of climate, trade, and development that can help the Global South to build economic resilience through inclusive, low-carbon growth. It demands a new global order where green industrialization, localisation, and equity replace the old model of extraction and dependency.

In the subsequent three papers we have traced the Global South’s path through the green transition—from dependence on low-value agricultural exports, to the geopolitics of critical minerals, and finally to the challenge of clean-technology manufacturing. These are three strategic sectors, among others, in which structural inequities in global trade and finance regimes trap developing countries at the raw-material stage while advanced economies capture value through processing and innovation.

Access the remaining papers in this series here: