G20 leaders make vague environmental commitments as climate summit kicks off in Glasgow | Univision Mundo News

The leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies gathered at the G20 summit in Rome on Sunday pledged Achieving carbon neutrality “In the middle of the century or about the middle of the century” before the conclusion of the two-day summit that was paving the way for United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

According to the final statement, the G20 leaders also agreed Ending public financing of offshore coal powerBut they did not set any targets for phasing out coal domestically, in a clear reference to coal-dependent countries, including China NS India, hit to Britain, who foresaw stronger commitments ahead of the Glasgow meeting.

The G20 accounts for more than three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and hosts the summit, Italy, was pursuing strong goals on how to reduce emissions and help poor countries cope with the impact of rising temperatures.

Without them, the momentum of the broader annual talks that began on Sunday in Glasgow and where nations from all over the world, including the poor and most vulnerable to sea level rise, desertification and more, will be represented could be lost.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi told leaders ahead of Sunday’s final working session that they urgently need to establish Long-term goals: How to make short-term changes to achieve them.

“We have to accelerate the phase-out of coal and invest more in renewable energy,” he said. “We must also ensure that we use the available resources wisely, which means that we must be able to adapt our technologies and our lifestyles as well to this new world.”

The future of coal, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, has been one of the hardest things for the G20 to agree on. Still, the United States and other countries are hoping for a commitment to end external financing for coal power generation, a senior US official who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Associated Press.

Western countries s They stayed away from financing coal projects in developing countriesAnd major Asian economies are doing the same now: Chinese President Xi Jinping announced at the United Nations General Assembly last month that Beijing would stop funding such projects, and Japan and South Korea did something similar earlier this year.

however, China has not set a deadline for building coal plants in its country. Coal remains the main source of power generation in China, and both China and India have resisted proposals for a G-20 statement on phasing out domestic coal consumption.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said before the Rome summit that he had tried but could not get a compromise on coal disposal from the Chinese president, who did not travel to the meeting and participated by video link.

In Glasgow, Johnson said: “We want these leaders … to focus on the concessions they can make, away from the use of fossil fuels, away from coal-fired power plants nationwide.”

Climate activists had hoped that wealthy G-20 nations would take steps to fulfill a long-term commitment, but it has not yet materialized, To raise $100 billion annually to help developing countries move toward greener economies and adaptation to climate change.

Young climate activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nackett issued an open letter to the media as the summit concluded, emphasizing three key aspects of the climate crisis that are often underestimated: time is running out, that any solution must do justice to the people most affected by climate change, and that the biggest polluters often hide behind incomplete statistics on their true emissions.

The climate crisis will become more urgent. We can still avoid the worst of the consequences, and we can still reverse it. And, they wrote, just weeks after Thunberg embarrassed world leaders with his “lying blah” rhetoric during the Youth Climate Summit in Milan, not if we continued like this today.

Prince Charles also addressed the G20 on Sunday morning and urged leaders to listen to young people, who are inheriting global warming, warning that “It’s the last chance”.

Charles, the veteran environmental activist, said public-private partnerships are the only way to achieve the trillions of dollars in annual investment needed to transition to clean, sustainable energy sources that will mitigate rising global temperatures.

“It is impossible not to hear the desperate voices of the young men who see them as rulers of the planet, who have the patency of their future in their hands,” Charles said.