Current Climate Commitments Not Nearly Enough To Avoid Dangerous Changes, Fiji Says
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
Next week’s UN meeting in Bonn, Germany, which will see the island nation of Fiji preside, will include work on the creation of a so-called rule book for the Paris Climate Accord.
In preface to that, Fiji’s chief negotiator, Luke Daunivalu, has been quoted by Reuters as saying that “the current commitments nationally are woefully inadequate.”
While that appraisal is itself not very good, it’s perhaps still an underestimate of the situation. The reality seems to be that nothing much is being done in any serious sense to limit the extent and intensity of anthropogenic climate change.
Reporting about the plans submitted by various countries to the UN in preface to the meeting, Reuters states: “China, for instance, said there are still ‘huge gaps’ in efforts to curb climate change and that rich nations are lagging in pledges to provide $100 billion a year to developing nations from 2020 to help them tackle warming.”
“Small island developing states, from the Pacific to the Caribbean, say they are suffering ever more from rising sea levels and storm surges whipped up by cyclones. They say there is too much hand-wringing and too little action…The rule book, formally the ‘implementation guidelines’ for a pact that has no sanctions for non-compliance, will define ways to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions, and how to review and step up national actions every 5 years.”
This rule book is expected to be finalized at a further meeting in December, but, as noted above, it will never be binding.
Summing up the situation, the environment minister for the Maldives, Thoriq Ibrahim, stated: “If we spent as much time working on this problem as we do congratulating ourselves for caring so deeply about it, we would be closer to an outcome worthy of a celebration.”
No kidding. There’s a deep chasm between actions that are truly effective (and likely to not be very palatable to most people) and those that are undertaken for PR purposes.
And, for that matter, between “beliefs” that are acted upon, and those that simply signify group/tribe association.
The UN meeting in question will run from April 30 through May 10 in Bonn, Germany.
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 10–15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
