The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, opened yesterday the summit of leaders of the COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, with a call to make the conference the “beginning of the end” in the fight against global warming.
“If we fail, our children will not forgive us. They will judge us bitterly, and they will be right,” Johnson told the 120 heads of state and government gathered at the summit.
World leaders will commit today to halt and reverse deforestation in 2030 with measures supported by $ 19 billion in public and private funds, the British presidency announced.
Johnson turned to the figure of the “most illustrious son of Scotland”, the spy James Bond, to make an analogy between his fictional adventures aimed at saving the world and the real threat to the planet posed by climate change by human action .
“We are almost in the same position as Bond, except that the tragedy is that this is not a movie and the countdown to the day of the end of the world is real and the clock is ticking,” said the premier.
Johnson’s intervention gave way to two days in which leaders will present their strategies to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC.
Negotiators will then try to close an agreement over the next two weeks at a climate summit that is considered the most important since the Paris Agreement in 2015.
UN Secretary General António Guterres in Glasgow called on the international community to commit to cutting CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030 to avoid “digging our own grave.”
“It is time to say enough. Enough of brutalizing biodiversity, enough of killing ourselves with carbon, enough of treating nature as a latrine and digging our own grave,” he said.
US President Joe Biden defended that the massive response needed to stop the climate crisis must be seen as “an incredible opportunity” for all the world’s economies.
“This is the decade that will determine the next generations. It is the decisive decade in which we have the opportunity to show ourselves that we can maintain the goal of (limiting warming to) 1.5ºC,” Biden said at COP26.
Queen Elizabeth II called in a video message to world leaders to a “common front” to confront climate change.
For her part, the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg stressed in a gathering of the environmental group Fridays For Future, that “change will not come from within” because the leadership “is out here, not within COP26.”
PAL
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