The ocean has been the “life insurance of the planet” and COP28 corrected one of the errors of the Paris Agreement. The analysis is from the executive administrator of the Blue Ocean Foundation.
Tiago Pitta e Cunha highlights that, for the first time, the United Nations conference recognizes the importance of the oceans in the fight against climate change.
“To date, the ocean has absorbed 93% of the excess heat generated by global warming and if it were not for this absorption of heat from the atmosphere by the ocean, we would have more than 17 ° C in the atmosphere. What It would mean that we would no longer have a viable world for human beings. Therefore, the ocean has done an indescribable job in the sense of having been the life insurance of the planet, the life insurance of the human species and until now without any “This recognition is also not yet made to any magnitude in the COP28 documents, but at least it recognizes that the protection and restoration of the ocean and its ecosystems is also crucial to combat climate change.”
For the head of the Blue Ocean Foundation, the COP28 final document represents progress, but it could have gone further.
“The UN biodiversity process, which was approved last year in Montreal, Canada, sets the goal that by 2030 we should be able to have protected areas for terrestrial and marine nature. We wanted this goal to be included here too, because that would be the “Validation by climate negotiators of an objective that was validated by biodiversity negotiators at the global level, which, by the way, are the member countries of the United Nations. “We couldn’t get this 30% target to remain in these COP28 texts.”
Tiago Pitta e Cunha also affirms that it is necessary to restore nature, which is the guarantor of the balance of the planet, and calls for caution in the solutions found.
“There is something that worries the Blue Ocean Foundation and it is the green light that is given in this COP to new large systems, some geoengineering, that aim to eliminate and eliminate greenhouse gases from the planet. Some of them can also be very questionable from the point of view of their implications for the planet itself. We must have a precautionary principle before creating large carbon removal plants that could also cause damage, particularly to biodiversity. We must change our relationship with nature, we must restore nature, because only then can we recover the biochemical balance, which allowed the planet’s climate to be balanced for millennia and not as we are witnessing at this moment.”
The United Nations conference on climate change approved the gradual abandonment of fossil fuels, to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The objective of tripling the production of renewable energy worldwide and doubling in 2030 the global average annual rate of energy improvement. efficiency, as well as accelerate efforts to phase out coal-based energy production.
Source: TSF
