The Paris Summit, convened last month by French president Emmanuel Macron, failed to make much headway on its ambitious goal of retooling global finance and jump-starting climate investments. A major stumbling block is the lack of progress on relief for the nearly 60 percent of low-income economies estimated to be nearing debt distress levels. Without debt restructuring, new investments in climate mitigation in places most at risk will remain an impossibility.

This is not the first time that grand declarations of debt relief and financial reform have failed to live up to expectations. A much-touted global sovereign debt roundtable initiated by the G20 and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) earlier in the year has now met three times without notable progress. Little wonder: these forums are dominated by creditor countries. Their interests, and the interests of the private creditors primarily in those countries, inevitably center around securing loan repayments while preserving profit margins. The structural inequalities that create such huge margins and make debt repayments so burdensome inevitably get pushed to the background.

In essence, creditor countries are holding their indebted counterparts hostage, and the forums that supposedly exist to rectify that situation are functionally useless. Any realistic effort to retool global finance can only take place at a representative global legal forum where all countries can seek transparent and fair negotiations. Creating that forum will be an enormous undertaking. But as looming climate catastrophe makes clear, it’s also a necessary and urgent one.