Climate diplomacy has avoided the worst-case scenario, but more action is needed: UN 4/06/2024

Volunteers hand out cold drinks to people at a heat wave relief camp along a road on a hot summer afternoon in Karachi on June 3, 2024. (Photo by Asif HASSAN / AFP)

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Climate diplomacy has avoided the worst-case scenario, but more action is needed: UN

Humanity has made progress in combating global warming but remains on track for a “ruinously high” rise in the Earth's temperature, the UN climate chief said at the start of crucial talks on Monday.

Diplomats meet every June in Bonn to try to make progress on the most difficult points of the climate talks so that political leaders can finalize agreements at the COP summit at the end of the year.

At this year's Bonn talks, which run until June 13, the main issue is money: how much rich nations should pay to help low-income nations deal with climate change.

A new long-term target for climate aid should be agreed upon by almost 200 nations at the COP29 summit in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in November.

Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, called on participants in the mid-year talks in Bonn to “make every hour here count”.

“We can't afford to arrive in Baku with a lot of work still to be done,” he told negotiators in the German city.

International diplomacy has avoided a scenario in which the planet warms by five degrees - a world in which “most of humanity would probably not survive”, said Stiell.

“Now we're heading for around 2.7 degrees. That's still too high and there's a long, steep road ahead,” he added.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations agreed to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and strive for a safer limit of 1.5 C.

The new COP29 president, Mukhtar Babayev, said that the progress made in Bonn “will be the basis for tangible results at COP29”.

In 2009, the rich nations most responsible for climate change so far agreed to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 for countries without resources to invest in clean energy and adapt to extreme weather conditions.

They only reached this target for the first time in 2022, two years after the deadline. Donors have also been criticized for providing loans instead of grants.

The next round of financial pledges is due after 2025, but there is no consensus on how much should be raised, who should pay, and where it should go first.

There has been resistance to calls for prosperous emerging economies such as China and the Gulf nations to contribute.

Some countries want the level of their climate action to depend on how much money is made available. Countries must submit their updated climate plans by the beginning of 2025.

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