Photo: Presidencia

By KELIN DILLON

During the first day of the G20 summit on Monday, Nov. 18, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (CSP) proposed that her fellow world leaders band together to “stop sowing wars and sow peace and life” by diverting a small portion of military spending toward environmental initiatives.

In particular, Sheinbaum suggested allocating 1 percent of global military spending toward the “largest reforestation program in history.”

“This would mean establishing a fund of some 24 billion dollars a year to support six million tree planters who would reforest 15 million hectares, something like four times the surface area of ​​Denmark, all of Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador together, or 30 percent of that of Sweden,” said Sheinbaum at the time.

The Mexican federal executive pointed to her nation’s own reforestation program Sembrado Vida – which has planted billions of trees over the past six years to capture 30 million tons of CO2 annually – as proof of the global project’s potential success.

“It is absurd and senseless that more is spent on weapons than on addressing poverty or climate change,” continued CSP. “We would reduce migration and hunger if we only elevated the word love above hate, the generosity of the humble and dispossessed person above greed and the desire for domination. I refuse to think that we are capable of creating artificial intelligence and incapable of giving a hand to those left behind.”

“What is happening in our world that in just two years spending on weapons has grown almost three times as fast as the world economy? How is it that the economy of destruction has reached a spending of more than 2.4 trillion dollars? How is it that 700 million people in the world still live below the poverty line?” Sheinbaum concluded to the G20 leaders.