Environment ministers from the world’s seven largest industrialized democracies are meeting in Paris this week. Climate change is not on the agenda.

France, which holds the rotating G7 presidency, explicitly dropped the subject to avoid a confrontation with the United States. “We chose not to address the climate issue head-on… because the United States’ positions on this subject are well known,” the office of French ecology minister Monique Barbut said. The goal, her ministry explained, was to “prioritise G7 unity, particularly to protect this forum.”

The calculation is not without logic. Since returning to the White House in January 2025, President Donald Trump has systematically dismantled federal climate policy. He withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement. He scrapped greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles. And in February, he revoked the 2009 endangerment finding — the scientific determination, rooted in a 2007 Supreme Court decision, that greenhouse gases threaten public health. That finding served as the legal foundation for virtually every major federal climate rule, and its repeal could place limits on carbon dioxide from power plants and methane from oil and gas operations in jeopardy. Trump declared the determination had “no basis in fact […] and no basis in law,” despite the Supreme Court having reaffirmed it multiple times, including as recently as 2022. The administration claimed the repeal would generate more than $1 trillion in regulatory savings, without detailing how the figure was calculated. NRDC president Manish Bapna called it “the single biggest attack in history on the United States federal government’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis.”

Washington’s presence in Paris reflects the diminished priority. The US delegation is led not by the EPA administrator but by Usha-Maria Turner, assistant administrator for international and tribal affairs — a deputy-level posting.

What Made the Cut

In place of climate, the two-day agenda covers five themes: biodiversity financing, ocean conservation, water resource security, the links between desertification and armed conflict, and natural disaster resilience. On Thursday afternoon, ministers will travel to Fontainebleau forest south of Paris for a session on woodland preservation.

France is pushing a “nature and peoples financing alliance” to mobilize public and private capital for biodiversity protection. Barbut’s ministry hopes to announce up to $800 million in funding for national parks across roughly 20 African countries, according to sources close to the discussions. The G7 also aims to produce a political declaration on desertification and security, while ocean sessions will seek to strengthen a marine protected areas alliance.

Jean Burkard, advocacy director at WWF France, welcomed the biodiversity focus but cautioned that any funding “must be additional and not compensate” for budget cuts to nature programs elsewhere — a pointed remark in a year of shrinking environmental spending across multiple G7 members.

The Price of Unity

Civil society groups were unsparing. Gaia Febvre, international policy lead at Climate Action Network, told AFP: “A G7 moving at the pace of the United States cannot claim to respond to the crises of the century.” By yielding to American pressure, she argued, the group “weakens collective action and renounces its potential leading role.”

The timing sharpens the criticism. Days after the G7 adjourns, more than 50 countries will convene in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first-ever global conference on phasing out fossil fuels — the main driver of the warming that the Paris meeting will not discuss.

France’s calculus is recognizable, if unremarkable. Barbut’s office cited the need for a smooth run-up to the G7 leaders’ summit in Evian in June, under Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. A public rupture over climate would dominate news cycles but produce no joint statement. Paris decided that consensus on oceans and forests was worth the silence on carbon.

The result is a gathering of environment ministers discussing the environment selectively — the parts that do not antagonize Washington, and not the parts that do. Six nations whose governments accept the scientific consensus on warming have agreed to avoid the subject so the seventh will not walk out. The G7 has preserved its unity. What it has traded away to do so is the more uncomfortable question.

Sources