With less than three weeks to go until a key global conference on climate change gets underway in Paris, ministers from more than 60 countries have been in the French capital trying to hammer out the details of a potential deal.
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Meeting that goal will require sustained ambition over time, well beyond the 2025 or 2030 horizon of the Paris commitments. A recent report by the World Bank suggests that this could push an extra 100 million people into poverty through climate change related shocks such as failing crops, desertification and flooding.
The UN Global Compact-Accenture CEO Study report, Special Edition: A Call to Climate Action, is based on a survey of 750 business leaders from UN Global Compact participant companies.
The November 30-Dec. 11 conference will gather more than 190 parties to seek an agreement aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures between pre-industrial times and the end of this century.
To reach this, countries have submitted their “intended nationally determined contributions”, which outline how much they pledge to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
African leaders said they were looking to the talks for solutions to electrify the continent, grow its economies and keep their young people from fleeing overseas.
“We are big in the oil industry and we know oil industry is traditionally not the friend of our climate, but we also know that we’ve taken revenues from our oil industry and invested in renewable sources of electricity”, Davis said, citing the money invested in Muskrat Falls.
Most importantly, according to the World Bank, is how climate change will affect agriculture production, yielding fewer crops and higher prices in areas that are already food scarce, such as Sub-Saharan Africa.
The lawmakers from Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Britain will gain knowledge and share examples of success and best practice in parliamentary action on energy and sustainable development, with experts from the private sector, civil society and worldwide organizations. The research, undertaken by Accenture Strategy, finds that 70 percent of executives representing companies with annual revenues of more than $1 billionn see climate change presenting opportunities for growth and innovation for their company within the next five years. Climate finance is expected to be one of the hard issues to agree on at that crucial conference, reported Xinhua.
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Building a new post-2020 climate architecture demands a balancing act between political signals provided by ministers and complex bargaining on technical issues between negotiators.
