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This study systematically assesses the Group of 20 (G20) summit's performance on digitalization across the key dimensions and suggests what has caused its particular pattern of performance thus far [Kirton, 2013]. It argues that the G20 summit's digitalization governance has been increasingly successful. Its digitalization agenda steadily expanded since the beginning, with a major surge in 2016-17. G20 summits first addressed digitalization in response to the American-turned-global financial crisis of 2008. Then, G20 leaders acknowledged e-commerce as an important tool to manage the crisis. They then gradually expanded their agenda to finally focus on inequality, a root cause of antiglobalization. They thus moved from a crisis-response to a crisis-prevention approach. This spread and spike is seen in the G20's direction-setting, decision-making and institutional development of global governance, but not in its delivery of its decisions. This overall performance was driven partly by the shocking surge in populism bred by inequality in the UK and U.S. in 2015 and 2016, by the failure of the established multilateral organizations in response, by the global predominance and equalizing capabilities of G20 members in specialized digital capabilities and their convergence on the economic growth through openness that digitalization brought. Yet this performance flowed primarily from the hosting of economically reforming China in 2016 and export-oriented Germany in 2017, whose politically secure leaders sought to shape digitalization for the benefit of all in response to the rise of populism and protectionism in the UK and the United States. 2

Since the G7 summit invented the global governance of climate change in 1979, its performance has passed through three phases: leadership of an effective inclusive environment first regime from 1979 to 1989; deference to the UN's ineffective, selective, development-first regime from 1992 to 2004; and a return to an effective, G20-supported, inclusive, environment-first regime from 2005 to 2015. The latter culminated at the Paris summit, which however, produced a political plan that was designed to fail, at a time when the irreversible tipping point in the real material world rapidly approached and just before the US elected a President slow to accept and act on the striking facts. The central challenge of the G7's Taormina Summit in 1979 is to ensure that G7 members comply with their still unfulfilled past climate commitments, by adding accountability measures that work, improving them immediately in ways that enhance their implementation and activating assistance from the G20's Hamburg Summit in July. To improve climate change compliance, the Taormina G7 Summit should specify an agent in its commitments, make more climate commitments each year and hold regular environment ministers' meetings.

How well and why have Group of 20 (G20) summits advanced Agenda 2030’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) in a synergistic way, with climate change and digitization at the core? An answer to this urgent, indeed existential, question comes from a systematic analysis of G20 summit governance of the SDGs, climate change and digitization to assess the ambition and appropriateness of advances within each pillar and the synergistic links among them. This analysis examines G20 governance of the SDGs, sustainable development, climate change and digitization across the major dimensions of performance and evaluates how performance has changed and become synergistic with the advent of the SDGs in 2015 and the shock of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. The latter has shown the need to prevent global ecological crises and spurred the digitization of the economy, society and health. Yet, G20 summit governance has largely remained in separate silos, doing little to use the digital revolution to address climate change or reach the SDGs. This highlights the need for G20 leaders to forge links at their future summits by mainstreaming the SDGs and mobilizing the digital revolution and climate action for future health and well-being.