TIME UP - UN Chief excludes world’s top polluters from climate summit
UN Chief tells world top polluters namely; China, United States, Russia, India and Japan that they are not taking the climate threat seriously enough as per the UN Paris Agreement objectives
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres aimed a message at the world’s largest polluters when he excluded them from his Climate Ambition Summit that took place in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly recently. His message – you are not taking the climate threat seriously enough according to the Environment News Service.
Guterres excluded the world’s five largest emitters of heat-trapping greenhouse gases – China, the United States, Russia, India and Japan – from his Climate Ambition Summit.
But Guterres’s message to the world’s largest polluters at the Climate Ambition Summit was undermined by the fact that most of the leaders he barred from the summit – Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – chose not to attend the UN General Assembly in the first place.
The United Kingdom, another big polluter, also was absent from the summit, amid reports that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had avoided the UN General Assembly after being warned he would be excluded from the climate discussions.
“Humanity has opened the gates of hell,” Guterres told the leaders of the countries that were invited, emphasizing action. “We must make up time lost to foot-dragging, arm-twisting, and the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels.”
The summit, announced by Guterres in December 2022, was intended to be a “no-nonsense” showcase of the “first movers and doers” fighting to keep alive the “increasingly unrealistic goal” of limiting global warming to 1.5°Celsius (2.7°Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The central objective of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate is its long-term goal to hold global average temperature increase to “well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
In May, for the first time, the World Meteorological Organization warned that global temperatures are more likely than not to rise above 1.5°C of warming within the next five years,
The United Nations kept the final list of world leaders invited to speak at the Climate Ambition Summit hidden until Tuesday evening.
In the months leading up to the summit, Guterres had said that only countries that had taken significant steps to address climate change would be invited, and could only attend if they sent a high-level leader to the summit.
Several G20 countries made the final cut, including Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and nine European Union countries, including Germany, France, and Spain.
Guterres told the General Assembly on Tuesday, “To all those working, marching and championing real climate action, I want you to know that you are on the right side of history and that I am with you.”
“One summit will not change the world, but today can be a powerful moment to generate momentum,” Guterres said. “We can and we must turn up the tempo.”
* Source : Environment News Service (ENS)