UNITED NATIONS — A trio of leaders at international climate negotiations urged their counterparts Thursday to step up efforts to combat global warming, but outside groups and threatened countries told these leaders to look in the mirror, had to follow their own advice – and stop pumping fossil fuels.
At the United Nations, the troika of the current and next two presidents of the UN climate conferences have told other leaders to make their required climate action targets – due in February next year – much more ambitious. New national plans must be aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement goal to limit warming 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, span their entire economies and include all heat-trapping gases, the trio of leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Brazil urged.
“The world is not on track to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Mukhtar Babayev, who will take charge of international negotiations in November when Azerbaijan hosts the UN climate conference. “We face an urgent need for deep, rapid and sustainable emissions reductions, including by moving away from fossil fuels.”
In a two-hour session, Babayev and his counterparts in the UAE and Brazil discussed their “ Roadmap to mission 1.5. The world’s countries face a five-month deadline to set new national targets for reducing carbon pollution. The world’s current targets indicate warming of 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-19th century, but the three countries want new national plans to be more in line with 1.5 degrees Celsius .
Samoan Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa, who represents small island states, said she appreciated the push and pointed out that countries like hers did not cause the climate problem but are still reducing their emissions of heat-trapping gases. She then adjusted the richer countries during the session.
“Unfortunately, we are not seeing the same level of ambition from countries that bear the most responsibility for this current crisis,” she said. Her organization of 44 small island states said it was “not overly optimistic that this would significantly advance the course.”
Longtime climate negotiations analysts Alden Meyer of the think tank E3G and Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, which tracks emissions pledges, said negotiating leaders from the UAE, Azerbaijan and Brazil were big on rising rhetoric but their own nations’ actions lagged far behind . short.
Officials from the UAE, Azerbaijan and Brazil have not detailed how their countries would transition away from fossil fuels, Meyer said. C living even more difficult. This is not what real leadership looks like.”
In its latest update, Azerbaijan has “effectively weakened” its target, Hare claimed.
“The Troika, all of which are among the world’s largest oil and gas producing countries, are also on track to collectively increase their oil and gas production by a third by 2035,” said Romain Ioualalen, policy manager of Oil Change International.
National climate leaders responded to the trio’s pleas by saying they must limit warming to just a few tenths of a degree and that it was an urgent problem, but gave few details Thursday on how they would do that.
United Nations Climate Secretary Simon Stiell said: “We will need to move from a world that knows 1.5 must be achieved, to a world that knows how to achieve 1.5.”
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