ROADMAP SUPPORT
Climate change has slipped down the agenda as nations grapple with economic pressures, trade disputes, wars, and the Trump administration’s aggressive push for more fossil fuels.
Brazil has won support for a new fund to save the world’s forests, quickly raking in over US$5 billion in pledges to reward tropical countries for not chopping down carbon-absorbing trees.
The world remains off track to keep end-of-century global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. It is the primary target of the Paris Agreement struck in 2015, and deemed necessary to avert the worst catastrophes of climate destabilisation.
A coalition of hundreds of NGOs representing the interests of women, Indigenous peoples, workers, small-scale farmers and other disadvantaged communities was unimpressed by what world leaders brought to the two-day summit.
“The national plans of rich countries are not talking at all about a commitment they made two years ago … to move away from this brutal and cannibalistic fossil fuel economy,” said Jacobo Ocharan of Climate Action Network International, an NGO network that is part of an alternative so-called People’s Summit.
“Nor have we seen absolutely anything regarding climate financing, financing that reaches the populations suffering from this climate crisis,” he told reporters in Belem.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell stressed that, 10 years on from the Paris deal, global cooperation was delivering results.
“Without that act of collective courage, we would still be heading for an impossible future of unchecked heating, of up to five degrees,” he said.
“Because of it, the curve has bent below 3 degrees Celsius – still perilous, but proof that climate cooperation works.”
