Humanity dangers catastrophic international heating if it focuses solely on decarbonisation on the expense of restoring the pure world, Colombia’s setting minister has mentioned within the lead-up to the world’s key nature summit later this 12 months.
Susana Muhamad, who will likely be president of the UN biodiversity Cop16 summit in Cali in October, mentioned {that a} singular deal with reducing carbon emissions whereas failing to revive and defend pure ecosystems could be “harmful for humanity” and threat societal collapse.
Whereas laying out her imaginative and prescient for the assembly throughout a press briefing in Montreal, Canada, Muhamad mentioned a major focus could be to boost political consciousness for the pure world to maintain humanity in protected planetary limits.
“There’s a double motion humanity should make. The primary one is to decarbonise and have a simply vitality transition,” Muhamad mentioned. “The opposite aspect of the coin is to revive nature and permit nature to take once more its energy over planet Earth in order that we are able to actually stabilise the local weather.
“The local weather has way more consciousness and political funding, however we’re not seeing the opposite aspect of the coin, and it’s harmful. That’s harmful for humanity. One of many major functions for Cop16 in Cali is to make biodiversity and the worldwide biodiversity framework as politically related because the local weather agenda,” she added.
Whereas the character disaster has risen up the worldwide political agenda, with a 2022 UN settlement to halt the lack of biodiversity by the top of the last decade, thenature summits – which happen each two years – don’t get pleasure from the identical consideration from governments and world leaders as conferences in regards to the local weather, that are attended by tens of hundreds of delegates yearly.
Forward of talks, Muhamad urged governments from the worldwide north to make good on their commitments to extend funding for nature restoration, including that Cop16 would deal with tips on how to mobilise various sources of finance from the personal sector.
She referred to as for international locations to “make a gesture to extend belief within the convention and really put their cash within the international biodiversity fund that we authorized in Montreal [at Cop15 in 2022]. It will be an indication that we’re dedicated”.
The Colombian authorities has been a number one voice at for motion at worldwide environmental summits in recent times underneath the presidency of the nation’s first leftwing chief Gustavo Petro, and have become the primary main fossil gasoline producer to hitch an alliance of countries calling for a fossil gasoline non-proliferation treaty on the Cop28 local weather summit in Dubai final 12 months.
