COP26 leaders vow new drive to save forests
GLASGOW, United Kingdom — World leaders will conclude a two-day climate summit on Tuesday with a multibillion-dollar pledge to end deforestation by 2030 — a date too far away for campaigners who want action sooner to save the planet's lungs.
The pledge was to be issued at the UN's COP26 conference, which will continue for another fortnight to try to craft national plans to forestall the most devastating impacts of global warming.
The summit's chair, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said the agreement on deforestation was pivotal to the overarching ambition of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"These great teeming ecosystems –- these cathedrals of nature — are the lungs of our planet," he was expected to say in Glasgow, according to Downing Street.
"Forests support communities, livelihoods and food supply, and absorb the carbon we pump into the atmosphere. They are essential to our very survival," Johnson said.
"With today's (Tuesday's) unprecedented pledges, we will have a chance to end humanity's long history as nature's conqueror, and instead become its custodian."
The pledge is backed by almost $20 billion in public and private funding, and is endorsed by more than 100 leaders representing over 85 percent of the world's forests, the UK government said.
The leaders include those of forest-rich Brazil and Russia, both condemned by activists for accelerating their own rates of deforestation, along with US President Joe Biden and others.
President Joko Widodo of resource-blessed Indonesia said his own archipelago's rainforests, mangroves, seas and peatlands were key to restricting climate change.
"We are committed to protecting these critical carbon sinks and our natural capital for future generations," he said in a UK government statement.
"We call on all countries to support sustainable development paths that strengthen the livelihoods of communities — especially indigenous, women and smallholders."
10 more years
The pledge to "halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030" encompasses promises to secure the rights of indigenous peoples, and recognise "their role as forest guardians".
But while Johnson said it was "unprecedented", a UN climate gathering in New York in 2014 issued a similar declaration to halve the rate of deforestation by 2020, and end it by 2030.
However, trees continue to be cut down on an industrial scale, not least in the Amazon under the far-right government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Almost a quarter of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide can be attributed to land use activity such as logging, deforestation and farming.
Humans have already cut down half of all Earth's forests, a practice doubly harmful for the climate when CO2-sucking trees are replaced with livestock or monoculture crops.
Greenpeace criticised the Glasgow initiative for effectively giving the green light to "another decade of deforestation".
"Indigenous peoples are calling for 80 percent of the Amazon to be protected by 2025, and they're right, that's what's needed," said Greenpeace Brazil executive director Carolina Pasquali.
"The climate and the natural world can't afford this deal," she said.
Many studies have shown that the best way of protecting forests worldwide is to keep them under the management of locals with generations of preservation knowledge.
"We will be looking for concrete evidence of a transformation in the way funds are invested," said Tuntiak Katan Jua from the COICA indigenous organisation.
"If 80 percent of what is proposed is directed to supporting land rights and the proposals of Indigenous and local communities, we will see a dramatic reversal in the current trend that is destroying our natural resources," he said.
Bookmark this page for updates on the United Nations climate summit, known as COP26. Photo courtesy of AFP/Tolga Akmen
Singapore announces it aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, giving a firm date for the first time, and will look at using hydrogen as a major power source.
The city-state targets for carbon emissions to peak in 2030 at 60 million tonnes, a reduction of five million tonnes from the previous goal, Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said.
The Southeast Asian nation also has plans to look at developing low carbon hydrogen as a major power supply in the long term. — AFP
Australia will present a more ambitious UN emissions target "very soon" and is bidding to co-host a COP summit with Pacific island neighbours, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Thursday, signalling a ground shift in climate policy.
During a first solo overseas visit since her centre-left government was sworn in, Wong admitted that on the climate, "Australia has neglected its responsibility" under past administrations.
She told hosts in Fiji's capital Suva that there would be no more "disrespecting" Pacific nations or "ignoring" their calls to act on climate change.
"We were elected on a platform of reducing emissions by 43 percent by 2030 and reaching net-zero by 2050," Wong said. — AFP
Countries have proposed to hold an extra biodiversity meeting in Nairobi in June as talks in Geneva tasked with saving nature entered their final day Tuesday without an agreement.
In a document uploaded on the conference website, dated Monday, countries suggest holding a new meeting in the Kenyan capital between June 21 and 26 to "continue negotiations" on the document and other issues.
The decision is subject to official approval by the Geneva meeting before it wraps up later Tuesday. — AFP
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday hails a global accord to speed up action against climate change as "truly historic" and "the beginning of the end for coal power".
But he says his "delight at this progress" at the UN COP26 summit in Glasgow was "tinged with disappointment" because of a failure to secure the agreement of all countries to phase out hydrocarbons.
"Those for whom climate change is already a matter of life and death, who can only stand by as their islands are submerged, their farmland turned to desert, their homes battered by storms, they demanded a high level of ambition from this summit," says Johnson. — AFP
A UN climate summit text on Saturday urges nations to accelerate the phase-out of unfiltered coal and "inefficient" fossil fuel subsidies, after large emitters tried to remove the mention of polluting fuels.
The text, which comes after two weeks of frantic negotiations at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, omitted any reference to specific finance for "loss and damage" -- the mounting cost of global heating so far -- which has been a key demand of poorer nations.
The mention on Saturday of fossil fuels was weaker than a previous draft, which called on countries to "accelerate the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels". — AFP
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