The UN chief launched a scathing attack on world leaders after delegates at a climate conference in Bonn couldn’t even agree on an agenda for the meeting.
Of all the world’s leaders, it is the United Nations’ Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who has come to speak with the most force on our failure to rise to the threat of climate change, and so it was when he spoke as the Bonn Climate Change Conference came to a close this week.
“A third of the country [is] underwater and I go back and tell my people that we were fighting for agenda for two weeks. Come on, is it worth it?” he said to applause,The Bonn conference is crucial in setting the agenda for each year’s COP talks, where world leaders agree on what climate measures they will take, or at least claim they will take.
The developing world, which is so far bearing the brunt of the impacts, is demanding both mitigation and a focus on how wealthier nations will finance the global transition from fossil fuels, the cost adaptation to a warmer world and reparations for the loss and damage. ‘It’s time to stop pointing fingers at each other and saying your end of the lifeboat is sinking. If it goes down, we all go down together.’The Bonn talks left many observers despondent, says Dr Wesley Morgan, a senior researcher with the Climate Council. “It was fiddling while Rome burned.”
Al Jaber did not address journalists at the Bonn talks and nor did he make a speech at the plenary session, but during a private reception though he is reported to have observed that the phase down of fossil fuels was “inevitable”.
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