At UN climate talks, nations big and small get chance to bear witness to climate change
UNB
Publish: 13 Nov 2024, 08:47 PM
BAKU,
Azerbaijan, Nov 13 (AP/UNB) - More than two dozen world leaders are delivering
remarks at the United Nations' annual climate conference Wednesday, with many
hard-hit nations detailing their nations' firsthand experience with the
catastrophic weather that has come with climate change.
Leader after leader
recounted climate disasters, with each one seeming to top the other. Grenada's
prime minister Dickon Mitchell detailed a 15-month drought at the beginning of
the year giving way to a Category 5 Hurricane Beryl.
"At this very
moment, as I stand here yet again, my island has been devastated by flash
flooding, landslides and the deluge of excessive rainfall, all in the space of
a matter of a couple hours," Mitchell said. "It may be small island
developing states today. It will be Spain tomorrow. It will be Florida the day
after. It's one planet."
Small island nations
call for stronger climate action
Grenada's premier wasn't
the only small island nation leader who came with fighting words.
Prime minister Philip
Edward Davis warned that "it will be our children and grandchildren who
bear the burden, their dreams reduced to memories of what could have
been."
"We do not - cannot
- accept that our survival is merely an option," Davis said.
Davis said too often
progress in the fight against climate change gets hurt when governments change,
as is happening in the United States and Germany.
"If we leave
climate action to the whims of political cycles, our planet's future becomes
precarious, very precarious," Davis said. "The climate crisis does
not pause for elections or to accommodate the way of changing political ideas
or ties. It demands continuity, commitment and most of all, solidarity."
Leaders on a panel with
members of the High Ambition Coalition, a group of nations that want to see
strong climate action, highlighted the "inverted morality" of big
emitters who aren't taking responsibility for their impacts on countries who
have the most to lose.
Gaston Browne, the prime
minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said high-polluting nations are
"deliberately burning the planet."
Past promises of financial
aid went unfulfilled for too long, so small island nations will have to seek
justice and compensation in international courts, he said.
Marshall Islands
president Hilda Heine called the climate crisis "the most pressing
security threat" her country faces, but said she thinks the Paris
Agreement process - where countries agreed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees (2.7
degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times - is resilient.
Azerbaijan president
Ilham Aliyev took the opportunity to align his country with the predicament of
small island developing states in a speech where he called out developed
countries, in particular France and the Netherlands, for their colonial
histories.
He described the harms
of colonialism that continue today. Biodiversity loss, rising seas and extreme
weather hit communities that are often "ruthlessly suppressed," he
said.
The United States also
tried to show sympathy to hard-hit places.
"Do we secure
prosperity for our countries or do we condemn our most vulnerable to
unimaginable climate disasters?" United States chief climate envoy John
Podesta said. "Vulnerable communities do not just need ambition. They need
action."
European leaders recount
a year of extreme weather
European nations also
warned of climate catastrophe on their continent.
"Over the past
year, catastrophic floods in Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in
southern Croatia have shown the devastating impact of rising
temperatures," said Croatia's prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic. "The
Mediterranean, one of the most vulnerable regions, calls for urgent
action."
Albania Prime Minister
Edi Rama said he was dismayed by the lack of political action and political
will and leaders of many nations not showing up at climate talks as extreme weather
strikes harder and more frequently. Frustrated with other leaders mere talk,
Rama decried that "life goes on with old habits" and all these
speeches filled with good intent change nothing.
"What is happening
in Europe and around the world today doesn't leave much room for optimism,
though optimism is the only way of survival," Rama said.
Greek prime minister
Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Europe and the world needs to be "more
honest" about the trade-offs needed to keep global temperatures down.
"We need to ask
hard questions about a path that goes very fast, at the expense of our
competitiveness, and a path that goes some much slower, but allows our industry
to adapt and to thrive," he said. His nation this summer was hammered by
successive heat waves after three years of below-average rainfall. The misery
included water shortages, dried-up lakes and the death of wild horses.
Ireland environment
minister Eamon Ryan channeled some hope, saying that the 2015 Paris climate
treaty "still lives" and that countries who drop out will realize
they are falling behind as other countries move forward and see benefits to
their economies.
Negotiators labor on for
elusive deal on money
Negotiators at the
summit are looking to hammer out a deal on how much money, and in what form,
developed countries will pledge for adapting to climate change and
transitioning to clean energy for developing nations.
On Wednesday morning, an
early draft of what that final deal will look like was released, but it still
contained multiple options that negotiators will wrestle over to reach a
consensus by the end of the climate talks.
David Waskow, director
of international climate action at the World Resources Institute said the
latest 34-page draft reflects "all of the options on the table."
"Negotiators now
need to work to boil it down to some key decisions" that can be worked on
at the second half of the summit.
The latest draft
"does incorporate some new demands" including an ask for one of the
largest negotiating blocs - the G77 plus China - for $1.3 trillion in climate
finance, said Avantika Goswami, a climate policy analyst with the New
Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment.
"Developing countries
have been clear that a provisional goal must be carved out to hold developed
country governments to account," she said.
End/UNB/AP/HM