Marcos gets invite to UN climate change talks in Egypt
MANILA, Philippines — Egypt’s envoy to the Philippines invited president-elect Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. to attend the United Nations climate change conference there in November.
Egypt will host the climate change summit—known as COP27 (Conference of the Parties) — in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.
"This topic we talked about how the international community [can] respond to the challenges of climate change," Egyptian Ambassador to the Philippines Ahmed Shehabeldin said in a briefing after visiting Marcos in his Mandaluyong City headquarters.
“He believes in climate change issues and to be closely just following what would be the way forward,” he added.
In Sharm el-Sheikh, nations will focus on discussing the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement in their home countries, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said. The operational details of the said pact were finalized at COP26 in Glasgow last year.
The main aim of the Paris Agreement is to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius and drive efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In a report released in April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stressed that capping warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius involves "rapid and deep and in most cases immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors."
Lawyer Vicente Yu, a negotiator for developing countries, earlier told Philstar.com that global action on adaptation, finance, and loss and damage from climate change should remain high on the agenda of COP27.
Green transition
The Egyptian envoy also said that the northeastern African nation is "keen" on developing bilateral relations with Manila.
"We are looking forward to developing many areas of cooperation since we are agricultural countries and we can work for tourism and many aspects of cooperation," Shehabeldin said.
Marcos also met with Danish Ambassador Grete Sillasen, who said the meeting focused on green transition.
"The greenest, cheapest, and cleanest energy is one that we do not use and this was what the president-elect and I talked much about—how Denmark managed to double its gross domestic product without increasing our consumption of energy, water, and without increasing our carbon dioxide emissions," Sillasen said.
The Danish envoy added that Marcos is looking into increasing the contribution of wind energy to the power mix, but said that there are "no actual plans as such."
"More on dedication to seeing that sustainable and renewable energy is the way we need to look," she said.
- Latest
