UN Climate Action Summit: Glass half full
LOCAL STAKEHOLDERS are taking a ‘glass half full’ approach to gains from the recent United Nations Climate Action Summit in York, which was intended to yield concrete commitments from world leaders and members of industry to disrupt global warming.
“I see the global summit as really still part of the larger effort to keep the focus on the significance of climate change for humanity. And so even if it might have fallen short of the goals, I think it has still brought
(to the spotlight) the fact that this is an issue the world has to take note of because of the impact on the natural world and on human beings. I think it served a purpose, if nothing else, in doing that,” commented Professor Michael Taylor. Taylor is one of the lead authors for the groundbreaking special report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year. That report has established that the world at 1.5 degrees is in much better shape than one warmed to two degrees and makes the case for the accelerated and global push to achieve 1.5.
NO NEW COMMITMENTS
Meanwhile, the UN summit, held on September 23, saw no new commitments from major emitters, including China, and silence from the United States. Still, 77 other countries committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and 70 announced they would either boost their national action plans by 2020 or have started the process of doing so, according to a news release from the summit. “Over 100 business leaders delivered concrete actions to align with the Paris Agreement targets, and speed up the transition from the grey to green economy, including asset-owners holding over $2 trillion in assets and leading companies with combined value also over $2 trillion,” it added.
Young people, among them 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, also made their voices heard. Their voices were together with those of others who took to the streets in solidarity with UN Secretary General António Guterres, who said in his opening remarks at the summit: “I will not be there, but my granddaughters will, and your grandchildren too. I refuse to be an accomplice in the destruction of their one and only home.”
According to Taylor, it is clear the youth participation resonated with some players.
“Certainly, you could see that that struck a chord with a number of people, that climate change is not just something that is debated among scientists and governments, but now young people see it as something that is threatening their future. And that also is one of the things that came out of the whole summit, the youth voice and that climate change is an inter-generational thing. It’s not just something for the present but also something for the future,” he told The Gleaner.
Environmental advocate Emma Lewis agreed.
“It seems to me that the discourse has been taken to another level by the generation who will be most affected,” she said.
According to UN estimates, the world would need to increase its efforts between three- and five-fold in order to successfully contain climate change to the levels dictated by science, that is, a no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in temperatures. This is in order to escape the worsening climate impacts already being experienced globally.
Those impacts include rising sea levels and sea surface temperatures and the associated impacts on species, including migration; and extreme weather events, the likes of Hurricane Dorian that devastated The Bahamas recently.