The world must act now if it wants to “save humanity” from the catastrophic impacts of global warming. This is what the UN Secretary General urged world leaders, meeting in Glasgow for the final environmental meeting on Monday. The long-awaited summit began with host Boris Johnson invoking the fictional secret agent James Bond, to demand that governments “defuse” the time bomb of the climate crisis facing the planet.
On this second day of COP26, dozens of Heads of State and Government took the floor in the Scottish city of Glasgow, under the premise of reaching quick, but above all, lasting agreements against the climate emergency.
The United Nations Conference on Climate Change brings together some 25,000 people, in one of the largest international events since the pandemic began. It also occurs after a year of extreme weather conditions, such as droughts and fires.
Therefore, for environmental activists, this new conference should represent a turning point, in which the participating countries agree to increase their emission reduction targets, in order to limit global warming to at least 1 , 5 degrees Celsius.
That limit was established by the international community six years ago, in the Paris Agreement (COP21). This goal is being missed, and the most recent projections estimate that the world is heading almost double, to more than 2.7 degrees Celsius.
Johnson compared the climate crisis to Agent 007’s missions
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson opened the summit on November 1 with a call to make the conference the “beginning of the end” in the fight against climate change.
The president, whose government is hosting the talks, turned to the figure of “Scotland’s most illustrious son”, the spy James Bond, to make an analogy between his fictional adventures and the real threat posed by global warming: “We are almost in the same position as James Bond, except the tragedy is that this is not a movie.”
“Humanity has been playing with the weather for a long time. Now there is one minute to midnight on the doomsday clock,” he said. He also recalled that he was present when the Paris Accords were signed, “but those promises will be nothing more than ‘blah blah blah’ if we do not make this COP the time to be realistic about climate change,” said the British, echoing Recent accusations by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg of the constant “blah blah blah” from world leaders.
The face of the youth movement for the climate – as well as many other young people such as the Colombian Francisco Vera Manzanares – did not miss in Glasgow to put pressure on the leaders. In an online petition that already exceeds one million signatories, he called for the climate emergency to be addressed immediately.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, did not hesitate to use categorical formulas.
“Enough digging our own grave,” he added. “Enough of brutalizing biodiversity, enough of killing ourselves with carbon, enough of treating nature like a latrine”; the summit must act to “save humanity”, declared the UN high command.
The word “ambition”, on everyone’s lips
US President Joe Biden also used the word “ambition.” The president requested this Monday that this climate event be “the starting point of a decade of ambition and innovation.”
He stressed that climate change “is not hypothetical”, but already affects the lives of many people, even in their own country, in the form of uncontrolled fires, floods or droughts, without counting displacement due to environmental transformation .
During his speech, he also publicly apologized for his predecessor Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the nation from the Paris Agreement: “I suppose I shouldn’t apologize, but I do apologize for the fact that the United States – the last Administration – withdrew. of the Agreement, and in a way he left us behind, “he declared, before concluding that” the United States has not only returned to the table, but I hope that it leads by example. “
Another leader in demanding more “ambition”, the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced Spain’s commitment to increase its contribution to the Green Climate Fund by 50% until reaching 1,350 million euros per year from 2025 ( more than 1,560 million dollars).
In another announcement of climate measures, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised that his country will reach the level of net zero carbon emissions by 2070. Although his goal is 20 years behind the overall goal of countries at the summit, this is the first time that India has set a deadline for carbon neutrality.
Modi also indicated that he aims for half of his nation’s energy consumption to come from renewable sources by 2030: “By 2030, India will reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 45%,” increasing its original measure by ten percentage points.
Xi Jinping present only by means of a written statement
As for the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions on Earth, China, there is no indication that significant progress can be expected after COP26.
The president of the Asian power, Xi Jinping, will have a presence at the summit only by written statement. On the other hand, the expected new issues report from China released last week was only a fraction higher than the previous one.
Neither the Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador nor the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro will attend from Latin America, despite the fact that the latter attended the G20 summit, which ended on Sunday in Rome.
However, Bolsonaro and the Minister of the Environment, Joaquim Leite, reported the climate goal of reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere by 50%, in addition to neutralizing carbon emissions by 2050.
The Brazilian leader also insisted that Brazil “is not part of the problem”, but of “the solution” in the fight against this emergency, in a three-minute video exhibited at the Brazilian pavilion in Glasgow, in which he did not mention the Amazonia or deforestation in the country.
With AFP, Reuters, EFE and local media
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source https://pledgetimes.com/cop26-day-2-world-leaders-exhorted-to-save-humanity/
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