BAKU: Global action on climate change "is robust and will endure” despite the re-election of Donald Trump, who has pledged to withdraw from the Paris agreement, the UN’s climate chief said Tuesday.
"Many of you have been reporting on the climate implications of political events in the last weeks. I’ll just say this: our process is strong. It’s robust, and it will endure,” Simon Stiell told reporters at the COP29 talks in Baku. Trump’s election sweep has cast a long shadow over proceedings in Azerbaijan, with concerns that the imminent US withdrawal from the landmark 2015 Paris deal could undermine ambition around the negotiating table.
Stiell reiterated calls for the meeting to show global solidarity on climate was not dead.
"Global cooperation is the only way humanity survives global warming,” he said. The crunch talks are centerd on increasing finance to help developing countries adapt to climate change and wean their economies off fossil fuel. But the small group of rich countries currently paying the funds want to see the donor pool expanded, and are resisting calls for the current pledge of $100 billion a year to be raised ten-fold. Many face domestic publics more concerned about inflation and sluggish economies than climate action.
But Stiell insisted the two were linked. "The climate crisis is fast becoming an economy killer,” he warned. Without action, "every country and every household will be hammered even harder than they currently are.”
Meanwhile, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde warned Tuesday of a widening gap between the amount of funding necessary to adapt to the climate crisis and what has so far been pledged. As delegates at the COP29 climate conference in Baku try to land a hard-fought deal to boost funding for climate action in developing countries, Lagarde said "the ‘financing gap’ is widening”.
She pointed to figures that suggest that financing needs are "50 percent higher than previously estimated and up to 18 times greater than current commitments”. "The energy transition alone requires investment in clean energy to triple by 2030,” she said in a column published by the Financial Times and on the ECB’s website. She cited estimates by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), according to which up to $11.7 trillion has to be spent on climate change mitigation annually by 2035 in order to meet the Paris agreement target to keep warming "well below” two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. This represents around ten percent of global economic output.
Lagarde, who has made climate protection a central goal of her tenure at the head of the ECB, said that events including the "horrific” recent floods in Spain and storms in North America showed that "the steep price of our inaction... is rising by the day”.
Such extreme weather events are "ruining the foundations of our economies and, ultimately, the basis of our economic survival,” she wrote. — AFP