(original title)
By Charlotte Lavin
This April at the Climate Summit 2021, world leaders have spelled out their ambitious plans to tackle the climate crisis. Biden, hosting the summit, invited 40 countries. Ireland, Sadly, was not amongst them.
The Climate Summit, which lasted one week felt like a contest: who was going to make the boldest promise on when they were going to reach carbon neutrality? China went as far as to pledge carbon neutrality by 2060, France insisted on social and climate justice saying one could not go without the other, Canada said its new climate target was to reduce its 2005 emissions by 40 to 45% by 2030 and net-zero by 2050, and the United Kingdom, host of this year COP26 conference (November, in Glasgow) said it wanted to slash emissions by 78% by 2035. Boris Johnson elusively said that UK’s leaders “see the obligations” of developed countries to “do more.”
But if you were to ask me now what Ireland’s goals where and how it was planning to reach them, I could honestly not tell you. The main action I saw coming from Ireland was the initiative to launch its own climate conference, presented as a “pre COP26 call to action” on their website: the Dublin Climate Dialogues Conference. The online event, that the United Nations and other developed countries participated in, resulted in the publication of a one page “set of recommendations” to be presented to a leading delegate of the UK Presidency of COP26 commissions. Amongst those suggestions, the electrification of the global economy, a just transition from fossil fuels, and the delivery of public pathways intended to help countries with their transition to net-zero should they want to. The two main suggestions were that Ireland should at least double its official development assistant on international finance by 2030, and that the country should build more partnerships to ensure a green transition supported by a healthy financial sector. Those, unfortunately, remain to this day only recommendations.
Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney’s endorsement of the Dublin Climate Dialogues Conference, a few days before handing the Dublin Declaration to the UK
government, sounded like yet another pat in the back from idle politicians. Saying that the event had been a “strong platform for progress”, “thought-provoking” and had come at a “timely” moment, he added in his concluding remarks that Ireland had “stepped up its game on climate action.”
The good news here is that it looks like Ireland is going to turn its promises into “concrete energy policies and actions to be adopted at CO26”, as said on the ESIPP website. The bad news is, how many countries have pledge to do that so far? The last thing we need is yet more promises and ideas on how to solve the crisis. The World Meteorological Organisation published its report: there is a 40% chance the world will reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise mark by the end of the next five years. We need actions, and we need them now.This past April at the Climate Summit 2021, world leaders spelled out their ambitious plans to tackle the climate crisis. President Joe Biden, hosting the summit, invited 40 countries. Ireland, unfortunately, was not amongst them.
Find the published article on The Global Spectator website: https://global-spectator.com. Published July 14, 2021.
Comentários