The president of the United Nations Climate Change Conference reaffirmed Monday his respect for scientific recommendations on climate change and called for a 43% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
“We are here because we believe in science and respect it,” Sultan Al Jaber said in response to criticism following news that appeared in the British press this weekend.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper released a video of a debate deemed ‘tense’ with former Irish president and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, in which Sultan deemed the exit from fossil fuels inevitable but warned that too rapid The transition to limit global warming to 1.5ºC would lead the world to the ‘cave age’ and called for pragmatism in this area.
“All the work of the presidency is focused on science,” Al Jaber said at a press conference on Monday, to which he invited Jim Skea, chairman of the IPCC, the group of climate experts mandated by the UN.
Questioned by the EFE agency, the spokesperson for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP28) said on Sunday that Al Jaber was “unwavering in stating that achieving 1.5ºC implies the need to occurred.
The video has also been released on the Center for Climate Reporting portal and comes from an online event organized by the “She Changes Climate” initiative on November 21.
On the other hand, UN Secretary General António Guterres said on Sunday that the commitments made at COP28 by around fifty oil and gas companies are “clearly insufficient”.
Despite acknowledging that this is a “step in the right direction”, António Guterres said the “Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter” signed in Dubai does not address the fundamental issue of fossil fuel consumption.
For example, around fifty companies, responsible for more than 40% of global oil production, have committed to carrying out ‘carbon neutral operations’ and reducing methane emissions to near zero by 2050.
Source: DN
