PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron gathered world leaders yesterday to talk about climate finance, two years to the day since 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement to stave off worst-case-scenario global warming.
Without trillions of dollars of investment in clean energy, the pact’s goal to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels will remain a pipe dream, observers and participants warned.
“We hope that this conference will be action first thing, particularly on providing financial support for the developing countries and small island developing countries and vulnerable countries,” former UN chief Ban Ki-moon told AFP ahead of the summit.
UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa warned political action “will not be enough if we do not update and reset the global finance architecture and make all development low-emission, resilient, and sustainable.”
“We see some movement… but climate consideration must now be part of all private sector decisions,” she added.
After the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 to cheers and champagne, helped over the finish line by then US president Barack Obama, his successor Donald Trump has cast a long shadow over the process, withdrawing political support and finance.
Trump, who has called climate change a ‘hoax’, announced in June the United States would pull out of the Paris pact, which had taken nearly 200 nations more than two decades to negotiate.
The US is the only country to reject the agreement.
Macron said he hoped Trump would ‘change his mind’, and awarded grants to 18 climate scientists, 13 of them from American universities, to pursue their research in France to ‘Make Our Planet Great Again’ — a play on the American president’s campaign slogan ‘Make America Great Again.’
Money has long been a sore point in the UN climate process, with developing nations insisting on financial assistance to help them make the costly move to less-polluting energy sources, and to shore up defences against climate change-induced superstorms, mega-droughts and land-gobbling sea level rise.
Trump has asked Congress to slash the climate research budgets of federal agencies — threatening a loss of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.
The Trump administration would also not fulfil US climate finance commitments, including an outstanding US$2 billion out of US$3 billion it had pledged towards the Green Climate Fund.
“The missing piece of the jigsaw is the funding to help the world’s poorer countries access clean energy so they don’t follow the fossil fuel-powered path of the rich world,” said Mohamed Adow of Christian Aid, which represents poor country interests at the UN climate forum.
In the absence of former climate champion Obama, American businesses, regions and local government leaders have reiterated their commitment to decarbonisation, and are represented in Paris by the likes of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, ex-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Among the leaders in attendance at Tuesday’s summit will be UN chief Antonio Guterres, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Mexico’s Enrique Pena Nieto, Theresa May of Britain, Spain’s Mariano Rajoy, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
Trump was not invited to the gathering, and the US — the world’s biggest historical emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases — will be represented by an embassy official. — AFP