“We are digging our own graves”: that has been the message with which the Secretary General of the United Nations has started the inauguration of the Climate Summit in Glasgow. A call for help that has been joined by more than 200 world leaders.
COP26, which is being held in Glasgow, has a clear objective: to take real, pragmatic action, to prevent the planet’s global temperature from rising more than one and a half degrees this century.
The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recalls that we are still far from meeting the objective of the Paris Agreement and, in fact, points to a 2.7 degree warming by the end of the century.
A situation that places humanity in a “code red”, according to Guterres: “Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough burning, drilling and undermining our deepest path. We are digging our own graves. “
International society has to put it into practice. Time is short, and promises must materialize. In this sense, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has committed to allocate 1.35 billion euros per year to the Climate Fund from 2025.
Sánchez, who has been the first of the invited leaders to intervene, has also indicated that Spain is going to allocate 20% of its special drawing rights to vulnerable countries, which would mean a minimum of 350 million euros.
Biden: “God save the planet”
The president of the United States, who has starred in the anecdote of the day by falling asleep for a few seconds in the middle of the Climate Summit, he has tried to raise awareness with his speech about the importance of acting in a “decisive decade” when the world has “Limited time” to act against climate change.
Thus, he stressed that his country “has returned to the table” of the climate negotiations after his predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew the North American country from the Paris Climate Agreement. In fact, the president has apologized for this extreme.
In this way, he has announced his proposal to allocate from 2024 a total of 3,000 million dollars annually to financing vulnerable countries to help them adapt to rising sea levels, droughts, floods and other consequences of global warming.
China is absent
Chinese President Xi Jinping has submitted a written statement to the COP26 climate summit in which it advocates more aid for developing countries face the environmental crisis, without advancing new concrete commitments on the part of their Government. “Developed countries should not only make more efforts on their own, but they should also provide support to developing countries,” said the president, who has not left China since early 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Xi, from whom an intervention by videoconference was initially expected, urges governments in its declaration to set targets “really viable” and “to do what they can according to their national conditions.”
The Chinese president expressed his confidence in “multilateralism” as the “correct recipe” to face major global challenges such as climate change and stressed that the 2015 Paris Agreement has provided a “fundamental legal basis in international cooperation” against warming.
“The negative impacts of climate change have become more and more evident, implying that global actions have become more urgent,” Xi argued. The greatest “challenge of our time”, said the Chinese president, is to promote economic recovery after the coronavirus pandemic while providing a response to the environmental emergency. “It is necessary to take advantage of innovations in science and technology to promote transformation,” said the leader of the Asian giant, which is committed to “updating” the energy sector, the “industrial structure” and the “consumption pattern.”
The promise of India, another of the most polluting countries
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged at COP26 climate summit for your country to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2070, two decades after what the UN asks for.
This is the first time that India, a country of about 1.4 billion people, a deadline is set for carbon neutrality, although its goal is twenty years behind the general objective of the summit, which is committed to advancing the reduction to 2050.
In a speech to the plenary of world leaders gathered at COP26 in the Scottish city of Glasgow, Modi also announced that India aims for half of its energy consumption come from renewable sources in 2030.
Mario Twitchell is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his insightful and thought-provoking writing on a wide range of topics including general and opinion. He currently works as a writer at 247 news agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
