Since taking over the
presidency of the Council of the European Union from Germany at the start of
this year, Portugal has emphasised that climate change is “an existential
threat to humanity” and has given the subject top priority in the run-up to
November’s crucial United Nations COP-26 summit in Glasgow.
At a meeting entitled Climate Change – New
Economic Models organised by the EU Council last Friday, the Portuguese
minister for the environment and climate action, João Pedro Matos Fernandes,
told participants that “Portugal was the first country in the world to commit
itself to carbon neutrality and it firmly believes that we can only create
value and grow the economy within the limits of the natural system.”
The minister went on to say that “Europe underscored just this with the EU
Green Deal. The investment in sustainability is essential to an improvement in
the conditions of the planet and to economic growth.”
Frans Timmermans, the executive vice-president of the European Union, said at
Friday’s conference: “the climate and biodiversity crises threaten – without
any exaggeration – our very survival”.
In a recorded statement, Timmermans said that “even though the pandemic still dominates
our daily lives, Europeans still strongly – and increasingly – support climate
and environmental action”.
On the current situation, Timmermans emphasised that “the pandemic has
taught us a harsh lesson about how our own health and wellbeing are depend on
that of the planet.”
He said he fully agreed with a statement by the former Portuguese prime
minister and now secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres,
that “making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century,” adding
that “we have just a limited number of years left to avoid causing ecocide”.
Portugal’s current prime minister, António Costa, noted last week that Europe
had made a commitment to be the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050, and
that this is the “core aspect of the vision enshrined in the European Green
Deal, which establishes a new development strategy for Europe and a roadmap for
making Europe sustainable.”
The EU Council is aiming to pass an EU 2030 climate target into law by June
this year. This would include the bloc’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by at least 55% by 2030.
On Wednesday last week, the renowned ecologist and broadcaster Sir David
Attenborough said in an impassioned address to the United Nations Security
Council: “please make no mistake, climate change is the biggest threat to
security modern humans have ever faced.”
In Sir David’s words, “if we continue on our current path we will face the
collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to
fresh water, habitable ambient temperature, and ocean food chains. And if the
natural world can no longer support the most basic of our needs, then most of
the rest of civilisation will quickly break down.”
There were, however, some grounds for hope, said Sir David. “While it’s true we
can never go back to the stable, benign climate that enabled us to flourish for
the past 10,000 years, I do believe that if we do act fast enough, we can reach
a new stable state.”
As Sir David pointed out, there are obvious signs that global warming is
already causing events with disastrous consequences: “Continents are on fire.
Glaciers are melting. Coral reefs are dying. Fish are disappearing from our
oceans. The list goes on and on.”
The United States climate envoy, John Kerry, told the Security Council that the
United Nations COP-26 summit would be, “our last best hope to get on track and
get this right.”
John Kerry continued: “we are now compelled to do more than talk about
climate-related security risks. We have to work together to understand them
before they wreak havoc; we have to develop stronger early-warning systems; we
have to mainstream the climate crisis into every aspect of our public and
private sector and decision-making. And in the face of climate-fuelled challenges,
we have to make certain that cooperation, not conflict, is the response of
first resort.”
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and billionaire philanthropist, said in a
recent BBC interview that solving the Corvid-19 pandemic would be “very, very
easy” compared to solving climate change, which, if successful, would be “the
most amazing thing humanity has ever done.”
The challenge of avoiding a global warming disaster should not be
underestimated, he said. “We've never made a transition like we're talking
about doing in the next 30 years. There is no precedent for this.”
Climate activists agree that one essential reform to be made by the nations of
the world is to stop dumping 56 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere each year. Net zero is where we need to get to. So far we have some,
but not all, the ways of doing that.
The biggest polluters are China, which annually releases more than 10 billion
tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, followed by the United States (5.4 billion
tons) and India (2.6 billion tons). The biggest CO2 polluter in the European
Union is Germany with about 760 million tons.
Serious steps to tackle climate change only really began with a treaty signed
in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro organised by the the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
This was followed in 1997 by the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, which entered
into force in 2005.
The biggest step taken by the UNFCCC so far has been the Paris Agreement signed
by 196 countries in 2016. Its main goal remains the same today: to keep the
increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6 °F) above
pre-industrial levels, and if possible to limit the increase to 1.5 °C (2.7
°F).
The Paris Agreement broadly rests on the understanding that keeping long-term
temperature in check and reducing greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible
will substantially reduce the risks and impacts of climate change. Each
signatory to the Paris Agreement is expected to determine, plan, and regularly
report on its contribution.
The next major UNFCCC gathering, scheduled for November in Glasgow, may well be
absolutely pivotal. It’s an event Portugal and the European Council are very
much preparing for.
Sir David Attenborough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaweqwsN62k
Bill Gates video:
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