UN Chief: Climate summit a 'lost opportunity' for greater action

UN Chief Antonio Guterres said that he was disappointed with the results UN Climate Summit. This UN Climate Summit was the longest climate talks held in the past 25 years and while they did discuss a great many topics, according to Guterres the trickiest and most important topic, that was the issue of rising carbon emissions were left till the next climate summit in Glasgow.

A 'lost opportunity'

Guterres also added on Sunday that the climate summit was a 'lost opportunity' in the fight against global warming. Guterres said that the summit which saw the participation of 200 countries was a lost opportunity for leaders to be more ambitious when it came to tackling the problems of migration, adaption and financing the fight against climate change. The COP25 climate summit just managed to squeeze out hard-fought compromises over a global warming battle-plan.

Chilean Environment Minister and President of COP25, Carolina Schmidt said that the citizens of the world are asking for world leaders to move faster on the issue of climate change and while the summit declared the there was an urgent need for new carbon-cutting methods, some delegates like the climate envoy from the Marshall Islands called the measures taken in the summit to be inadequate.

Tina Eonemto Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands said that her country was facing an existential crisis because of the rising sea levels. She added that the text adopted by the summit just does the bare minimum and is not what her country wanted.
The Paris Accord that was the centre of the talks and which is set to become operational next year, the climate protests that had taken place globally had hoped to put pressure on the political leaders attending the summit and somehow force them to double down on their efforts to tackle climate change.

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According to Alden Meyer who is the director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists that the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases were notably missing from the talks and are actively preventing a call for actions against combating climate change. These major countries according to her are the United States, Australia and Saudi Arabia. The representatives of China and India which are the world's number 1 and number 4 carbon emitters stated that they had no plans to reduce their carbon emissions till 2030. 

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