G20 chair Indonesia yesterday told environment officials from the world’s leading economies that they must act together to combat a warming planet or risk plunging it into “uncharted territory.”
The call came at a one-day meeting on the resort island of Bali, at the end of a month in which more than 1,000 people died in Pakistan from flooding blamed on climate change and a crippling drought exacerbated by a record heat wave spread across half of China.
In opening remarks, Indonesian Minister of Environment and Forestry Siti Nurbaya Bakar told delegates that “global environmental problems require global solutions,” otherwise the planet could end up in a situation “where no future will be sustainable.”
Photo: AFP
“We cannot hide from the fact that the world is facing increasingly compounding challenges,” she said, referencing energy price spikes and global food shortages. “We know that climate change could become an amplifier and multiplier of the crises. We cannot solve those global environmental problems on our own.”
She added that climate change “would not only wipe out all development progress that has been achieved over past decades, particularly in emerging economies, but it would also propel us over an environmental tipping point into uncharted territory where no future will be sustainable.”
Some of the world’s top economies and emerging nations are being increasingly hit by record heat, flash floods and droughts — phenomena that scientists say would only become more frequent and intense due to climate change.
In attendance at the meeting were US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, British President for COP26 Alok Sharma and officials from India, Australia, Italy, Brazil, Japan, South Korea and the EU, among others.
A joint communique was expected to be agreed at the talks.
China — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — only sent a vice minister of ecology and environment to the meeting, according to a list seen by Agence France-Presse, with high-level officials staying home because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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