UN chief warns at COP29 that if you don't pay up, the climate will lead to disaster for humanity.
At the COP29 Summit on Tuesday, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres urged world leaders to "pay up", in order to prevent climate-driven humanitarian disasters. He also said that time was running short to limit a destructive increase in global temperatures.
Nearly 200 countries have gathered in Baku for the annual U.N. Climate Summit. This year, the summit is focused on raising hundreds and billions of dollars so that the world can transition to cleaner sources of energy while limiting the damage to the climate caused by carbon emission.
Many of the world's leading figures were not in attendance to hear Guterres speak on the day the summit was designed to bring leaders together and create political momentum for the marathon talks.
Joe Biden, the president of the United States, will not be attending after Donald Trump won in his presidential election. Trump is a climate-change denier. A deputy of Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will not be attending due to political developments in Brussels.
Guterres stated in a recent speech that "the world must pay its fair share on climate finance or the humanity will pay the cost." The ticking of the clock is what you can hear. "We are on the last countdown for limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and time is against us."
This year will be the hottest ever recorded.
Scientists claim that global warming is happening faster than anticipated. The world could have already reached a temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F), which is a threshold above which the risk of extreme climate change and irreversible warming increases.
As COP29 got underway, the unusual wildfires on the east coast of the United States that triggered New York air quality warnings continued to spread. In Spain, survivors have to cope with the worst flooding in modern Spanish history. The Spanish government has also announced billions of Euros for reconstruction.
'ECONOMY KILLER'
The summit began on Monday with an agreement that was seen as crucial to the launch of a U.N. supported global carbon market, which would fund projects worth billions of dollars that reduce greenhouse gas emission.
The success of the summit was marred by an argument over the priorities of the summit - a tug-of war between Europeans and small island nations against the Arab nations about how important the future of fossil energy should be.
The EU and other nations aligned with the EU reluctantly accepted a compromise after the opening procedure was delayed for at least five hours.
At a Tuesday press conference, COP29 officials tried to refocus the attention on the primary goal of this summit - a deal to provide up to $1 trillion annually in climate finance to developing countries.
All countries, including the richest and largest, have a vested interest in enabling every country to take aggressive climate action. Why? "Because the climate crisis is rapidly becoming an economic killer," said Simon Stiell. He is the head of UNFCCC Climate body, which facilitates the summit.
If all countries do not drastically reduce their emissions, then every country will suffer even more than it does now. "We'll live in a perpetual inflationary nightmare."
(source: Reuters)
