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South Africa’s G20 Presidency in 2025: Climate Crisis, Finance, and Geopolitics

South Africa’s presidency of the G20 (from December 2024 to November 2025) marks the first time an African nation leads the main forum for international economic cooperation. The presidency comes during a period of global instability, defined by the advance of the climate crisis, the rising debt burden of Global South countries, and the increasing fragmentation of the international political system.

Climate context: direct impacts on infrastructure

Southern Africa has been experiencing increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Between 2024 and 2025, the El Niño phenomenon intensified droughts in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, damaging food production and water supply. At the same time, coastal provinces in South Africa, such as KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, experienced severe flooding.

• In June 2024, floods in the Eastern Cape caused more than 100 deaths.

• Cyclone Idai, in 2019, generated losses above US$2 billion across three countries. This is significant, especially considering that Malawi’s GDP at the time was US$12 billion.

These events damage housing, transport networks, sanitation systems, and energy grids. In areas dominated by informal construction, the damage is even more severe.

Climate finance: the gap between promised and needed volumes

South Africa’s main agenda item at the G20 is the expansion of climate finance for adaptation and disaster response, a central demand of the Global South.

South Africa argues that climate finance should be treated as an international financial obligation rather than as conditional aid.

Cost of capital: barriers to sustainable investment

African countries face higher risk premiums, about 3% above those of countries with similar economic fundamentals. This additional cost makes infrastructure financing more expensive, including green and adaptation projects.

During its G20 presidency, South Africa proposed:

• Debt payment suspension clauses in financial contracts triggered by extreme climate events.

• Debt-for-environment swaps.

• The creation of an African credit rating agency to reduce asymmetries in credit assessments.

These measures aim to expand access to cheaper credit for resilient infrastructure.

Direct impacts on the sustainable construction sector

South Africa’s agenda has practical implications for construction professionals:

• The focus on climate adaptation requires buildings that withstand droughts, floods, and extreme temperature variations.

• Expanded green finance can support resilient social housing projects, upgrading of at-risk areas, and clean energy and sanitation infrastructure.

• The Just Energy Transition initiative requires decarbonization investments to include workforce training and retention of local jobs, including within the construction sector.

Geopolitics: reactions to the African presidency

South Africa’s presidency was marked by the absence of the United States, which officially boycotted the summit, citing internal human rights concerns. The absence opened space for other actors to expand their influence:

This configuration increases the influence of Global South actors in international forums. It may shape financing models and future technical partnerships.

Technical initiatives linked to infrastructure

The African presidency also proposed specific measures geared toward basic infrastructure:

• Clean Cooking as Infrastructure: proposes treating access to cooking energy as an economic infrastructure component. Supports the creation of funds and tax incentives for low-cost, low-emission technologies.

• Just Energy Transition: prioritizes concessional financing (low interest rates or subsidies) to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, and biogas, especially in urban and peri-urban areas.

These measures directly affect sectors such as urban planning, social housing, and distributed energy systems.

Conclusion

South Africa’s G20 presidency demonstrates the connection between infrastructure, climate justice, and economic stability. For the construction sector, the topics discussed have concrete implications:

• Changes in financing models may expand access to resources for sustainable projects.

• New resilience requirements demand technical updates from professionals.

• South-South cooperation (such as closer ties with Brazil and China) may create new partnership models and technology transfer mechanisms.

Climate adaptation has shifted from a competitive advantage to a minimum requirement for technical and financial feasibility.

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Video

NEOM and THE LINE: The Gap Between Sustainable Rhetoric and Material Reality

In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s NEOM initiative, especially its central project called THE LINE, has been presented as a model for the city of the future. Designed to house up to 9 million people in a linear structure that is 170 km long and 500 meters tall, the proposal promised an urban revolution with zero carbon, 100 percent renewable energy, and a new standard of human-centered urban life.

But the data and the material facts point in another direction.

The project’s financing comes almost entirely from oil revenue through the Saudi Public Investment Fund. This already challenges the narrative of a green transition. The contradiction becomes clearer when we look at how the project is being executed. There is forced removal of traditional communities such as the Huwaitat tribe, exploitation of migrant labor under conditions documented as abusive, and severe environmental impacts that include the destruction of bird migration routes and an estimated 1.8 billion tons of CO₂ emitted during construction.

The project also fails in its functional proposal. Research shows that the linear design, although innovative in theory, is highly inefficient in practice. The average distance between residents is greater than in current large cities, transportation relies on a centralized, vulnerable system, and only a small portion of the population will experience the idea of a “five-minute city.”

The narrative of innovation and sustainability is being used as an ideological superstructure to justify a project based on traditional methods of capital accumulation, such as land appropriation, social repression, and intensive resource extraction.

Want to dive deeper into the topic?

Watch the full video to understand THE LINE's material contradictions, its structural limits, and what it reveals about the real boundaries of sustainability when used as marketing.

Disclaimer: The video is in Brazilian Portuguese, but simultaneous translation and subtitles are available in multiple languages.