Ex-UN climate chief predicts climate action ‘explosion’

LONDON: In the next five to 10 years, the world will see an “explosion” of positive action on climate change, not only in terms of efforts to reduce planet-warming emissions but also in people’s daily lives, former United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said on Thursday.

As the annual climate talks hosted by Fiji in Bonn, Germany, were drawing to an end, Figueres told an event hosted by Reuters here that the world was poised for “a very exciting moment” on its journey towards a greener, cleaner way of living.

“We are embarked on a transformation that is now unstoppable, irreversible and more than anything else, it is exponential,” she said.

Scientists said on Monday, however, that world carbon emissions were set to rise by two per cent this year to a new record, dashing hopes global emissions had already peaked.

Calling herself a “stubborn optimist”, Figueres said the climate talks which ended yesterday had cemented four key trends that gave cause for international hope. These, she said, were the demise of coal, the “explosion” of renewable energy, the electrification of vehicles, and broader use of digital technology and artificial intelligence to rein in global warming.

“All of these together... means that we are no longer on linear progress on climate change. We have left that behind,” said Figueres, who is Costa Rican.

After finishing her term as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in July, she became convener of Mission 2020, a global initiative that seeks to bend the curve on greenhouse gas emissions downwards by 2020.

“This is not optional,” Figueres said, adding it was not her own dream but an imperative and shared task to meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial times, and ideally below 1.5°C.

“If we have not bent the curve (by 2020), we will have closed the door to 1.5°C, which is a tragedy,” she added. Reuters