[ad_1]
The COP27 summit kicked off Sunday in Egypt as nearly 200 countries grapple with growing climate impacts in a world upended by war and economic upheaval.
In just the past few months, a spate of climate disasters has killed thousands, displaced millions and cost billions: major floods in Pakistan and Nigeria, increased drought in Africa and the western United States, Hurricanes and unprecedented heat waves swept across three continents.
“Report after report paints a clear and bleak picture,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on the eve of the 13-day meeting in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
“COP27 must lay the foundation for faster and bolder climate action now and in this critical decade, when the global climate battle will be won or lost.”
Specifically, that means cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030 to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius above late-19th-century levels.
Scientists warn that warming beyond this threshold could push the planet into an uninhabitable greenhouse state.
But the current trend is for carbon pollution to increase by 10 percent by the end of the century, with the Earth’s surface warming 2.8 degrees Celsius, according to findings released last week.
read more: A year after America’s chaotic exit, Joe Biden calls Afghanistan a ‘god forsaken place’
Commitments made under the Paris Agreement, if kept, will only be reduced by a few tenths of a degree.
“Our planet is approaching a tipping point that will make climate chaos irreversible and bake forever in a catastrophic temperature rise,” Guterres said recently.
“We need to move from a tipping point to a turning point of hope.”
For the UN Climate Forum, that means transitioning from negotiation to implementation.
It also means shifting from politics to economics, with government investments in China, the US and the EU mobilizing hundreds of billions of yuan, dollars and euros to trillions of dollars.
The already daunting task of decarbonizing the global economy within a few years has been made even more difficult by a global energy crunch and rapid inflation, as well as debt and food crises in most developing countries.
[ad_2]
Source link
