{"id":12127,"date":"2021-06-14T23:24:41","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T06:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12127"},"modified":"2021-06-15T05:37:05","modified_gmt":"2021-06-15T12:37:05","slug":"post2-123","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12127","title":{"rendered":"“Rich countries urged to come up with detailed plans to cut emissions”, The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fiona Harvey,\u00a0Environment correspondent, 14 Jun 2021<\/p>\n

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Laurence Tubiana, a key player in 2015 Paris summit, says UK and others must explain how they will achieve climate goals<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Ocean Rebellion activists at St Ives, Cornwall on Sunday. Environmental campaigners criticised the G7 summit for a lack of action on the climate crisis.<\/span> Photograph: Jon Rowley\/EPA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Rich countries must come forward with detailed plans on how they hope to meet their climate targets, and Boris Johnson<\/a> must forge much closer relationships with developing countries to bring about the breakthrough needed on the climate crisis this year, one of the architects of the Paris agreement has said.<\/p>\n

The G7 summit, which ended on Sunday in Cornwall, achieved much less than campaigners had hoped<\/a>, with no significant new cash<\/a> forthcoming for the world\u2019s poorest and most vulnerable, on the frontlines of climate breakdown.<\/p>\n

There were promises by the world\u2019s richest economies to halt funding for coal<\/a>, but they fell short of the pledge to end all new fossil fuel development<\/a>that experts have said will be needed.<\/p>\n

The UK now has just 20 weeks to forge a global consensus on the climate crisis before UN climate talks called Cop26<\/a> to be held in Glasgow this November. Cop26 will be the most important climate meeting since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015<\/a>, and one of the last chances to put the world on track to meet its goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.<\/p>\n

Laurence Tubiana, the chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, who was the top French diplomat in charge of the 2015 Paris summit<\/a>, said the key was for rich countries to build trust among other countries by drawing up detailed plans on how to meet their own targets on greenhouse gas emissions, and come up with improved offers of finance for the most vulnerable.<\/p>\n

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\u201cCop26 will be a moment of truth,\u201d she told the Guardian. \u201cCountries have to display their precise plans and accountability mechanisms [to ensure that emissions cuts take place]. There is a lot of work to do to deliver this. We are at the end of the era of coal, oil and gas burning, and that [shift] has to start in earnest.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cLeaders will need to use the next four months before they meet again at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow to crack on with fleshing out the details of this global Marshall plan for green recovery and getting everyone everywhere vaccinated \u2013 and crucially, that means putting up the investment to make all this possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The G7<\/a> meeting left Johnson looking exposed on the world stage to some observers. Pledges by the G7<\/a> club of the richest democracies \u2013 the UK, US, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and the EU \u2013 on vaccines were disappointing to many, and the summit was overshadowed by tensions over Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol.<\/p>\n

The UK row about overseas aid spending \u2013 which Johnson is cutting from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%, with the loss of \u00a34bn to the developing world \u2013 also put him in a poor position<\/a> to browbeat his fellow leaders into stumping up more cash for climate finance<\/a>. Poor nations were promised $100bn a year from the rich world to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, but that longstanding pledge has fallen short by about $20bn.<\/p>\n

Mohamed Adow, the director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, said: \u201cIt\u2019s clear the G7 was a huge disappointment and it has undermined Johnson\u2019s credibility. It\u2019s hard not to think that the host of Cop26 cutting their aid budget is going to undermine efforts to raise climate finance from other countries. Overpromising and underdelivering is a bad look for the man overseeing the biggest climate talks since the Paris agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saleemul Huq, the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, said: \u201cThe UK having reneged on their own parliamentary act [on overseas aid] made the situation of Johnson as chair of the G7 non-credible for the other leaders. All of this does not bode well for Cop26.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tubiana said Johnson must do much more to reassure the developing world. At Cop26, every one of the 196 signatory countries to the Paris agreement has \u2013 in theory, at least \u2013 an equal say, and a deal can only be forged by consensus, so developing countries can make or break any compromise.<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou have to deliver a signal to developing countries that they are taken seriously,\u201d she said. \u201cOverseas aid is not just about aid, it is about political outreach and it shows developing countries that they have a seat at the table, alongside the US and China and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson can take comfort from the fact that the road to the Paris agreement was far from smooth. Tubiana recalls that a key meeting of the leaders of the G20 nations \u2013 the G7 and 13 other less democratic or smaller economies, including China, India, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey \u2013 just weeks before the climactic summit in Paris in December 2015 went very badly.<\/p>\n

\u201cSix months before Paris it was super-pessimistic, people thought there would not be an ambitious agreement,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd the G20 just before Paris was a disaster. After the G20, anyone would have said it is not worth even going to Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet with painstaking diplomacy the French repaired the tensions and managed to achieve a global consensus in the final weeks. Fortunately, the previous two years<\/a> had been spent carefully listening to developing country concerns and building reserves of trust that meant the French were seen as honest brokers for a fair deal. Given the outcome of the G7, Johnson must hope he has as much credit to draw upon.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiona Harvey,\u00a0Environment correspondent, 14 Jun 2021 Laurence Tubiana, a key player in 2015 Paris summit, says UK and others must explain how they will achieve climate goals Ocean Rebellion activists at St Ives, Cornwall on Sunday. Environmental campaigners criticised the G7 summit for a lack of action on the climate crisis. Photograph: Jon Rowley\/EPA Rich […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12141,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127\/revisions\/12141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}