The world is a long way off from meeting 2030 climate targets established in the Paris Agreement, and mobilising resources for developing countries is crucial to meeting them, said director-general of the COP28 climate summit, Al Suwaidi. — Bloomberg
SAO PAULO: Developed nations have to make good on their promise to provide US$100bil a year in financing to help emerging-market countries combat climate change, according to Majid Al Suwaidi, the director-general of the COP28 climate summit that will take place in Dubai this year.
The world is a long way off from meeting 2030 climate targets established in the Paris Agreement, and mobilising resources for developing countries is crucial to meeting them, Al Suwaidi said.
“We need to be investing across the board in every kind of solution that is going to get us back on track,” Al Suwaidi, who is in Brazil for the Amazon Summit, said in an interview on Tuesday. “We need to have this US$100bil delivered this year.”Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been a vocal advocate of having developed nations follow through on their climate financing pledges, which fall short of the trillions of dollars needed to actually prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The majority of future emissions will come from emerging economies that often don’t have the resources to finance climate mitigation, he said.
“This is something that was promised a long time ago and needs to be delivered,” said Al Suwaidi. “We need to pull out all the stops.”
Presidents from Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, the prime minister of Guyana, and top officials from Ecuador, Suriname and Venezuela joined Lula for the first meeting of the eight-member Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation since 2009.
Leaders from other tropical forest countries, including Indonesia, Congo and the Republic of Congo, also planned to take part in the two-day event.
For Lula, the summit is part of a push to reclaim a leadership role for Brazil in global climate negotiations, a seat it largely abandoned under former President Jair Bolsonaro, who rolled back environmental protections and drew international scorn as rates of deforestation rose.
On the eve of the summit, a coalition of major financial institutions, including Brazil’s national development bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, pledged to support sustainable growth in the Amazon.
The exact amount hasn’t been defined, but initial estimates suggest it could be as high as US$25bil, local newspapers reported.
That may also help generate the sort of private-sector financing environmental groups say is necessary to bolster foreign government aid Lula has secured, including hundreds of millions of dollars in pledged contributions from the United States, United Kingdom and other nations to the Amazon Fund, a Brazil-led initiative that finances forest protection. — Bloomberg
