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For 30 years, world leaders and diplomats have been gathering at United Nations negotiating sessions to try to curb climate change, but Earth’s temperature continues to rise and weather conditions worsen.
So this month, they are expecting less promises and more action.
Experts say previous pledges by some 200 countries fall far short and new plans presented this year will hardly accelerate efforts to fight pollution. And if the numbers aren’t enough for world leaders when the action begins on Thursday, there’s the setting: Belém, a relatively poor town on the edge of the vulnerable Amazon,
Unlike previous climate negotiations – and especially the talks 10 years ago that led to the historic Paris climate accord – the main aim of this annual UN conference is not to produce a grand deal or statement in its two weeks. Organizers and analysts have referred to this Conference of the Parties – less formally known as COP30 – as an “implementation COP”.
“It’s really going to tell a lot about what we’re doing on the ground,” the former UN climate chief said. cristiana figueresWho helped promote the 2015 Paris Agreement aimed at limiting warming.
Figueres and several of the more than three dozen experts interviewed by The Associated Press said negotiators have already set goals. Now countries need more money and political will to implement decades of words and promises and create policy to reduce heat-causing gases and stop deforestation. Only this, they say, will put a stop to global warming because it brings it down to a level the world agrees is too dangerous.
Adapting to a warming world and saving forests
In Belém, diplomats, activists, scientists and business leaders will discuss new national anti-climate plans, the need to save trees that absorb carbon pollution, how communities can adapt to warming and how to economically help developing countries most affected by climate change.
Host Brazil will preside and set the agenda. Sueli Vaz, who runs Brazil’s environment agency, said that for the talks to succeed, world leaders need to step up efforts and funding to tackle climate change and commit billions of dollars to efforts to stop deforestation and land degradation.
Those leaders arrived on Thursday for a two-day pre-meeting summit to discuss accelerating the fight against climate change.
“Having a COP in the Amazon creates a new level of accountability. You can’t talk about climate solutions while standing on land that is absorbing the planet’s carbon and ignore the people who protect it,” said Ariel Tchequi Deranger, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta, Canada, and executive director of the nonprofit Indigenous Climate Action.
Top polluters will not be there before the summit
The top leaders of the biggest carbon-polluting countries: China, the US and India are likely to be absent from that high-level meeting. They contribute about 52% of the world’s heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
China is sending its Deputy Prime Minister. America is mostly not participating in this conference under the President donald trumpA climate change skeptic who has begun the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. Some US cities and states are coming to show that they and businesses take climate change seriously, says former US Environmental Protection Agency head gina mccarthyWho is co-chairman of the group America Is All In.
Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. said it was important that world leaders understand the threat to countries like his: “Without the United States, without China, without India’s commitment, we really have no hope.”
“We want to see action … especially from the biggest polluters,” Whipps said. “Our community remains on the front lines and we cannot make any more promises.”
Figueres said he hopes “because of an extended sense of madness in the United States, this is a moment of coming together.”
But Panama’s Environment Minister Juan Carlos Navarro told the AP he had low expectations for the talks. He said such meetings have become “a jet-setting orgy of bureaucrats who travel around the world with a tremendous carbon footprint and accomplish nothing.”
More promising to reduce pollution or focusing on fulfilling promises?
There is already disagreement on the nature of this meeting. Brazil is pushing for implementation of previous plans as well as new emissions-reduction plans presented this year. But small island nations like Palau and scientists are saying that’s not enough. They said this warms the Earth by 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.
Palau and other island nations want negotiators to ask countries to be more ambitious in their new carbon pollution-reduction plans.
Imposing “normality” is “not building a future for vulnerable countries,” said Adele Thomas, head of adaptation at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But if nations do what they have already promised in previous climate-fighting plans, it could shave a whole degree Celsius — 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit — off projected warming, said Ani Dasgupta, chief executive of the World Resources Institute. Scientists agree with this estimate. Dasgupta said negotiators have focused for too long on big commitments rather than results in the real economy, adding that this is “the worst thing” that does not get the spotlight.
“What we need to do now is sign what we have signed,” said scientist Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany.
Disaster or path to optimism?
“The challenge today is not whether we phase out fossil fuels. The challenge today is whether we are too late?” Rockstrom said. “We are heading towards a catastrophic 3 degrees.”
Figueres, a former UN climate chief, agreed it looked bad. But he co-founded the organization Global Optimism and said he believes the world can do it.
“My optimism is not naive. I know who we are up against,” she said. “But my optimism is about determination. It’s about that we’re facing a really, really, really challenging threat here. And we don’t give up.”
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Borenstein reported from Washington. Isabel Debray from Buenos Aires and Melina Walling from Chicago contributed.
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