Afghanistan to take part in UN climate talks for first time since Taliban takeover 10/11/2024
- Ana Cunha-Busch
- Nov 9, 2024
- 3 min read
By AFP - Agence France Presse
Afghanistan to take part in UN climate talks for first time since Taliban takeover.
Susannah WALDEN
An Afghan delegation will attend the upcoming UN climate summit in Azerbaijan, the Foreign Ministry spokesman told AFP on Saturday. This is the first time since the Taliban government took power.
Afghanistan is considered the sixth most vulnerable country to climate change, and the Taliban authorities have lobbied to attend the COP summits, saying that its political isolation should not exclude it from international climate negotiations.
After trying to attend the UN climate summits in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates and failing,
“A delegation from the Afghan government will be in Baku,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi, referring to the summit starting on Monday in the Azerbaijani capital.
It was not immediately clear in what capacity the delegation would take part in COP29, but sources indicated that it would have observer status.
No state has recognized the Taliban authorities since they came to power in 2021, ousting the Western-backed government.
Officials from the country's National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) have repeatedly stated that climate change should not be politicized and have called for the resumption of environment-related projects that were suspended due to the Taliban's rise to power.
“Climate change is a humanitarian issue,” said NEPA's deputy director, Zainulabedin Abid, in a recent interview with AFP.
“We ask the international community not to link climate change to politics.”
Azerbaijan, a fossil fuel-rich former Soviet republic wedged between Russia and Iran, will host COP29 from November 11 to 22.
Baku reopened its embassy in Kabul in February this year, although it has not formally recognized the Taliban government.
NEPA has been invited to other environmental summits in the past but has been unable to obtain visas, as the director of the agency's climate change department, Ruhollah Amin, told AFP in a recent interview.
The agency has received an invitation and is working to obtain visas to attend the UN summit on desertification in Saudi Arabia, Amin added, but it is unclear whether they will receive them or to what extent they will be able to participate.
Afghanistan was a signatory to the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, in which almost all the world's countries agreed to drastically reduce emissions to limit the rise in global temperatures.
NEPA prepared its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which must be updated and strengthened every five years before the Taliban came to power.
- “All aspects of our lives”.
Since then, NEPA has been working to finalize the NDCs, although it is uncertain whether they will be recognized by the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
“In 2023, we decided that we should at least finalize this document, whether the secretariat accepts it or not,” said Amin.
“But as a national issue... we have to finalize that document.”
NEPA Director General Mawlawi Matiul Haq Khalil, a former Taliban negotiator and son of prominent jihadist Mawlawi Yunus Khalil, criticized Afghanistan's exclusion from last year's COP in Dubai, and called on other nations to allow the country to participate in Baku, according to local media reports.
He also called for Afghanistan to be compensated for the damage caused by climate change.
According to Amin, Afghanistan's total greenhouse gas emissions amounted to just 0.08%, according to a 2019 national report.
“That's very little,” he said. However, Afghanistan is one of the countries “most affected by the effects of climate change,” he added.
“It affects every aspect of our lives.”
The United Nations also called for action to help Afghanistan build resilience and requested the country's participation in international negotiations.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world after decades of war and is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which scientists say is causing extreme weather events.
Droughts, floods, land degradation, and declining agricultural productivity are among the biggest threats, said Stephen Rodriques, the UN Development Agency's representative in Afghanistan in 2023.
Flash floods in May killed hundreds of people and inundated large swathes of farmland in Afghanistan. Eighty percent of Afghans depend on agriculture for their survival.
sw/sst
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