Key sentence:
- Barack Obama urged the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow on Monday to address rising sea levels’ dangers to island nations.
Obama said their tales during the 2015 climate talks were essential to the Paris Agreement, which pledges countries to keep global warming “well below” 2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“My experience growing up in Hawaii has affected me,” Obama said, adding, “We must act immediately to help with adaptation and resilience.”
At the COP26 session, island leaders challenged Obama on the United States and other Western countries’ inability to meet obligations to pay $100 billion in climate money every year.
“Among others, the United States is chronically behind on its fair part of climate money,” Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said, adding that the most vulnerable are being ordered to “suck it up and wait.”
“The developed nations are failing us,” Bainimarama stated.
Obama arrives at the climate talks on Monday, the first day of the second week of talks, which will focus on the nitty-gritty issues that over 190 countries must agree to fully execute the Paris Agreement.
Obama’s goal at the summit is to show how far the world has progressed since the Paris Agreement six years ago while also emphasising that more challenging work is still ahead.
According to him, there is a significant difference between the International Energy Agency’s optimistic projection last week that newly made country and corporate pledges would limit global warming to 1.8 Celsius and the UN’s forecast that current plans would result in a “catastrophic” rise of 2.7 degrees Celsius this century.
He stated, “That makes a tremendous difference for island nations.” “Every degree to which we can mitigate counts.”
On Monday, he will meet with young climate activists, who he says will need to sustain the government burden to act on climate change.
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The Conference of Parties (COP) is a global decision-making organisation established in the early 1990s to execute the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change and subsequent climate agreements. It meets once a year.
The UK, which is hosting the COP26 summit, attempted to set the tone by pledging £290 million pounds (approximately $486.9 million Cdn) in new money, including support for Asia Pacific countries dealing with the effects of global warming.
It claims that the funds are in addition to “billions in additional international financing” pledged by wealthy nations such as Denmark, Japan, and the United States for adaptation and resilience in vulnerable countries, many of which have already seen the harshest consequences of climate change.
“To prevent more people from falling into poverty as a result of climate change, we must act immediately. We know that climate change has a disproportionate impact on individuals who are already vulnerable, “According to Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a British government official charged with focusing on adaptation and resilience.
While developing countries demand more money to assist them in adapting to rising temperatures, which have resulted in more frequent droughts, floods, and wildfires, wealthier countries have been concentrating their efforts on reducing carbon emissions.
According to scholarly estimates, the estimated economic cost of loss and damage in poor nations by 2030 is between $400 billion and $580 billion US each year, rising to $1.8 trillion by 2050, according to the Heinrich Boll Foundation.
Tuvalu’s foreign minister, Simon Kofe, showed how rising sea levels affect his little island nation, standing knee-deep in seawater while delivering his recorded message to the conference.
“The declaration contrasts the COP26 setting with the real-life issues faced in Tuvalu as a result of climate change and sea-level rise,” Kofe stated from a lectern on the Pacific island’s coastlines.
Source by CBC
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