Berlin says climate action skeptics 'cannot count' March 26, 2025

Annalena Baerbock Mitte Juni in Berlin © Axel Schmidt/​AFP/​Getty Images

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Berlin says climate action skeptics 'cannot count'

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Tuesday that critics who label action against climate change unnecessary and expensive "cannot count".

Tackling rising global temperatures was "not an end in itself", Baerbock said as Germany played host to a key forum for climate diplomacy.

"Whoever protects the climate also protects... humanity, our prosperity, and our security," she said in a statement.

Failure to act now would lead to "much higher costs" and "significantly lower economic growth in the future".

"Anyone who dismisses climate action in these turbulent times as being expensive, onerous, or superfluous cannot count," she said.

The annual Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin is an important staging post on the way to the COP summit, which this year will be hosted in Brazil.

It comes after US President Donald Trump decided to withdraw the world's top economy from the 2015 Paris climate agreement and vowed a "drill, baby, drill" fossil fuel push to exploit the "liquid gold under our feet".

Baerbock said, without naming any countries, that the Paris Accord to try to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels was "coming under pressure once again".

Opposition to the goal was "growing stronger" while sticking to the target was "more urgent than ever", she said.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2024 was the first full calendar year above 1.5C.

A single year above the limit does not mark a breach of the Paris Deal, which is measured as a rolling average over 20 or 30 years, to smooth out year-on-year temperature variability.

However, scientists have warned that the record temperatures could be a sign that breaking the threshold is only a matter of time.

Baerbock also stressed that an agreement on climate finance reached at the last COP summit in Azerbaijan needed to be followed up with "implementation".

That was needed, she said, to achieve a "socially just transition" and increases in energy efficiency, the share of renewable energy and stopping deforestation.

sea/fz/yad