South Korea to host P4G summit to tackle climate change

South Korea will host the second summit of a global public-private initiative this year to speed up efforts to tackle climate change, according to Seoul's finance ministry on Friday. The first summit of Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030 (P4G) was held in Denmark in 2018 with the aim of addressing challenges in the five areas of food and agriculture, water, energy, cities and circular economy.

P4G is a global network of governments, businesses and civil society organizations seeking to advance solutions to deliver on the United Nations' Sustainable

Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. The second summit will be held in June in Seoul, the finance ministry said in a statement. South Korean President Moon Jae-in has stressed the importance of joint efforts by both the public and private sectors to address major global challenges, such as poverty and climate change.

The world's billionaires have doubled in the past decade and are richer than 60 percent of the global population, the charity Oxfam said Monday. It said poor women and girls were at the bottom of the scale, putting in "12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day," estimated to be worth at least $10.8 trillion a year.

"Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist," Oxfam's India head Amitabh Behar said.

"The gap between rich and poor can't be resolved without deliberate inequalitybusting policies," Behar said ahead of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, where he will represent Oxfam.

Oxfam's annual report on global inequality is traditionally released just before the forum opens on Tuesday in the Swiss Alpine resort. It had some astonishing statistics. "The 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa," it said.

If the world's richest one percent paid just 0.5 percent extra tax on their wealth for 10 years, it would equal the investment needed to create 117 million new jobs in elderly and child care, education and health, Oxfam said.

Oxfam's figures are based on data from Forbes magazine and Swiss bank Credit Suisse, but they are disputed by some economists. The numbers show that 2,153 billionaires now have more wealth than the 4.6 billion poorest people on the planet.

Women and girls are burdened in particular because they are most often care givers that keep "the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies moving," Behar said. They "often have little time to get an education, earn a decent living or have a say in how our societies are run," and "are therefore trapped at the bottom of the economy," he added.

"Across the globe, 42 percent of women cannot get jobs because they are responsible for all the caregiving, compared to just six percent of men," Oxfam figures showed. Later Friday, US data showed December construction of new US housing shot to a 13-year high, added to positive investor sentiment.

Asia equities extended a global rally on Tuesday, with the US decision to no longer designate China a currency manipulator a further sign of easing tensions between the economic titans.

The Treasury announcement came days before the two sides are due to sign off on the first part of a wider trade agreement that has helped fan a rally in world markets.

It also led to a sell-off in safe-haven assets with the yen at a seven-month low and gold down almost one percent, while oil was also struggling with the US-Iran flare-up seemingly in the rear window for investors.

Asia was given a firm lead from Wall Street, where all three main indexes ended higher-with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 hitting fresh records-on reports the US was about to remove the manipulator label from China.