Nations urged to tackle ‘urgent threats’ at UN climate talks

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KATOWICE, Poland, Dec 2, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – With the direst warnings yet of
impending environmental disaster still ringing in their ears, representatives
from nearly 200 nations gathered Sunday in Poland to firm up their plan to
prevent catastrophic climate change.

The UN climate summit comes at a crucial juncture in mankind’s response to
planetary warming. The smaller, poorer nations that will bare its devastating
brunt are pushing for richer states to make good on the promises they made in
the 2015 Paris agreement.

In Paris three years ago, countries committed to limit global temperature
rises to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and to the
safer cap of 1.5C if at all possible.

But with only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, the world has
already seen a crescendo of deadly wildfires, heatwaves and hurricanes made
more destructive by rising seas.

In a rare intervention, presidents of previous UN climate summits issued a
joint statement as the talks got underway in the Polish mining city of
Katowice, calling on states to take “decisive action… to tackle these
urgent threats”.

“The impacts of climate change are increasingly hard to ignore,” said the
statement, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. “We require deep
transformations of our economies and societies.”

In Katowice, nations must agree to a rulebook palatable to all 183 states
who have ratified the Paris deal.

This is far from a given: the dust is still settling from US President
Donald Trump’s decision to ditch the Paris accord.

G20 leaders on Saturday agreed a final communique after their summit in
Buenos Aires, declaring that the Paris Agreement was “irreversible”.

But it said the US “reiterates its decision to withdraw” from the landmark
accord.

Even solid progress in Katowice on the Paris goals may not be enough to
prevent runaway global warming, as a series of major climate reports have
outlined.

– ‘Failure to act will be catastrophic’ –

Just this week, the UN’s environment programme said the voluntary national
contributions agreed in Paris would have to triple if the world was to cap
global warming below 2C.

For 1.5C, they must increase fivefold.

While the data are clear, a global political consensus over how to tackle
climate change remains elusive.

“Katowice may show us if there will be any domino effect” following the US
withdrawal, said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and
a main architect of the Paris deal.

Brazil’s strongman president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, for one, has promised
to follow the American lead during his campaign.

Even the most strident climate warnings — spiralling temperatures, global
sea-level rises, mass crop failures — are something that many developed
nations will only have to tackle in future.

But many other countries are already dealing with the droughts, higher
seas and catastrophic storms climate change is exacerbating.

“A failure to act now risks pushing us beyond a point of no return with
catastrophic consequences for life as we know it,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief
negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, of the UN talks.

A key issue up for debate is how the fight against climate change is
funded, with developed and developing nations still world’s apart in their
demands.

Poorer nations argue that rich countries, which are responsible for the
vast majority of historic carbon emissions, must help others to fund climate
action.

But wealthy states, led by the US, have so far resisted calls to be more
transparent in how their contributions are reported — something developing
nations say is vital to form ambitious green energy plans.

“Developed nations led by the US will want to ignore their historic
responsibilities and will say the world has changed,” said Meena Ramam, from
the Third World Network advocacy group.

“The question really is: how do you ensure that ambitious actions are done
in an equitable way?”