The transfer comes amid mounting frustration with world leaders’ refusal to part out fossil fuels.
United Nations Secretary-Basic António Guterres introduced Monday that he’ll convene a “no-nonsense” Local weather Ambition Summit subsequent yr amid mounting frustration with world leaders’ refusal to part out fossil fuels and take different mandatory steps to fight runaway planetary warming.
“I name on each chief to step up — from governments, enterprise, cities and areas, civil society, and finance,” Guterres said throughout his end-of-year press convention at U.N. headquarters in New York Metropolis. “They have to include new, tangible, and credible local weather motion to speed up the tempo of change. The invitation is open.”
“However,” the U.N. chief added, “there’s a worth of entry and the worth of entry is non-negotiable — credible, critical, and new local weather motion and nature-based options that can transfer the needle ahead and reply to the urgency of the local weather disaster have to be offered. It will likely be a no-nonsense summit. No exceptions. No compromises. There shall be no room for back-sliders, greenwashers, blame-shifters, or repackaging of bulletins of earlier years.”
Information of the particular convention, set to happen in September 2023, comes after two just lately concluded U.N. local weather summits — the lobbyist-riddled COP27 climate event in Egypt and the COP15 biodiversity gathering in Montreal — left advocates dismayed by world leaders’ failure to take concrete motion to deal with the planet’s most urgent emergencies.
At COP27 — a summit so disappointing that some local weather advocates are demanding a boycott of COP28 — policymakers did nothing to finish what Guterres has deemed nations’ “fossil gas habit.”
“The Local weather Ambition Summit shall be convened alongside an important gathering of world leaders to speed up motion on the mid-way level of the Sustainable Development Goals,” Guterres mentioned Monday. “I’m extra decided than ever to make 2023 a yr for peace, a yr for motion. We are able to’t settle for issues as they’re.”
Guterres’ Local weather Ambition Summit is scheduled to start two months earlier than COP28 within the United Arab Emirates, one of many world’s largest oil producers.
In accordance with new research from the UK’s Met Workplace, subsequent yr is predicted to be one of many hottest on report and “the tenth yr in succession that temperatures have reached no less than 1°C above pre-industrial ranges.”
Alex Rafalowicz, director of the Fossil Gasoline Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said in an announcement that Guterres’ summit “can differentiate itself from boards previous by placing actual options on the desk that deal with the most important driver of the local weather disaster: fossil fuels.”
“Fossil fuels didn’t discover their approach into the local weather COP however they have to if the [secretary-general’s] summit is to succeed,” mentioned Rafalowicz. “This implies phasing out all fossil fuels in a approach that’s quick, truthful, and sufficiently financed.”
