The UN Climate Conference is being held in Bonn
Author(s): Нора Иванова, Редактор Растителна Защита /РЗ/
Date: 14.11.2017
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Bonn – From 6 November to 17 November, the UN Climate Change Conference is being held in Bonn. Within the framework of the event, new rules will be proposed for the operational implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which will be finally adopted in 2018 at the next climate conference in Katowice, Poland.
The twenty-third session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has already been taking place for a week in Bonn, which was chosen as the venue of the event because the seat of the secretariat of the Framework Convention is located there. The presidency of the event was assumed by Fiji, but due to the lack of capacity of the island state, Germany offered to host it. During the conference there are about 400 organized events, and the registered various participants include not only representatives of environmental organizations, but also energy companies and European institutions responsible for the future implementation of the concluded climate agreement.
A key topic will be the establishment of a unified mechanism for assessing the efforts of the different countries to combat global warming, as well as the so-called “facilitative dialogue” between the individual countries. In addition to the Paris Agreement, the meeting in Bonn has the ambitious objective that the individual states commit themselves to common goals in the field of climate. Last Friday, the UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa called on the EU to engage more actively on climate change issues.
The talks will also address the so-called Green Climate Fund, whose purpose is to finance developing countries in their response to climate change. Despite the pledged 100 billion dollars to the Fund, so far about 2.5 billion have been disbursed, mainly to international organizations or UN agencies. The demand of a number of African countries is that the process of reviewing proposals be simplified and that faster disbursement of funding for approved projects be ensured.
The USA and their withdrawal from the Agreement
Following Donald Trump’s decision in the summer to withdraw his country from the Agreement and to stop financing the Green Climate Fund, the participating states began to ask themselves whether such a global agreement could at all enter into force without the presence of one of its main actors. For the time being, all countries that signed in Paris continue to seek a common dialogue on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and are trying to convince the USA of the necessity of joint efforts to protect the climate.
At the beginning of the conference, a report was presented, signed by 13 American environmental institutions, in which global warming is perceived as a consequence solely of human activity. Further in the report, the authors warn that a rise in sea level of up to 2.44 m by the year 2100 is possible.
At the same time, the world’s second-largest economy has begun actively limiting industrial pollution, with many factories in the country being shut down after thorough inspections. During the congress of the Communist Party of China, a decision was taken that the concentration of fine particulate matter in the atmosphere be reduced from 47 micrograms per cubic cm in 2016 to 35 micrograms per cubic cm in 2035.
3 degrees Celsius
Exactly two years on, the fate of the Paris Climate Agreement increasingly resembles that of the unsuccessful Kyoto Protocol, which in 1997 was the first global environmental agreement in addition to the UN Framework Convention. The difference between the promises made at the conferences and reality shows the enormous gap between intentions and the implementation of concrete objectives.
And while the leaders of the major world economies play with the patience of all those affected, industrial pollution is increasingly exerting a negative impact on nature. According to the latest UN report, with the current pace of industrial development, the global temperature will rise by 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the decade.
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