Lula called on Tuesday not to let up the pressure to bring the climate negotiations to a successful conclusion in Baku, referring to a “fight for survival”, on the second day of a G20 summit which did not give any decisive impetus on the subject.
“We cannot postpone the task of Baku to Belem (where Brazil will host, in the Amazon forest, the next COP30 climate conference in 2025),” warned Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who chairs the G20 this year.
“History is watching us,” also said US President Joe Biden, who is leaving his post in January, referring to “the greatest existential threat to humanity”.
The two men spoke at the opening of the last plenary session of the summit, devoted to climate.
The G20 (19 countries, as well as the European Union and the African Union) accounts for 85% of global GDP and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate expectations for its summit in Rio were therefore high, before the return to the White House of climate skeptic Donald Trump and as the Baku conference entered its home stretch.
Lula can boast of success with a commitment, in the joint declaration of G20 leaders published Monday evening, to cooperate to “effectively” tax the most fortunate.
The text also mentions “the need to increase climate finance” and bring it to “trillions of dollars, coming from all sources”, emphasizing the needs of poor countries.
But for some NGOs, the G20 did not go far enough on the question of who should pay. And he even backed down on the question of phasing out fossil fuels, by not explicitly taking up the wording that had been taken from the previous climate conference in Dubai, and taken up again in October in a G20 declaration at ministerial level.
– “No room for negationism” –
Lula on Tuesday called on everyone to do their part.
“Even if no more trees are uprooted, the Amazon will remain threatened if the rest of the world does not fulfill its mission of containing global warming,” he said. He notably suggested that “the developed countries of the G20 anticipate their objectives” of carbon neutrality to “2040 or 2045” instead of 2050.
“In the fight for survival, there is no place for denialism and disinformation,” he also insisted.
The message takes on particular resonance before the return of Donald Trump, who promised during his campaign to “drill at all costs”, questioned the reality of climate change, and said he wanted to take the United States out of the Agreement again of Paris on the climate, as during his first mandate.
The United States is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world after China.
“The climate crisis will not wait for Donald Trump,” warned Andrew Nazdin, director of the environmental association Glasgow Action Team, during an activist action organized on the sidelines of the G20, calling on leaders to “act now and decisively to tackle the climate crisis.”
If the climate was a major issue at the Rio summit, it was also caught up in geopolitical news.
Despite Lula’s efforts to talk about the “poor” rather than wars, the latter were invited to the Rio summit, starting with Ukraine.
Again on Tuesday, the head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov promised from Rio an “appropriate” response to the Ukrainian firing of American ATACMS missiles against Russia, denouncing the involvement of the United States in these strikes and seeing it as a “new phase” in the conflict.
Washington has just authorized kyiv to use its long-range missiles to strike targets in Russia. And the latter affirmed on Tuesday that such an attack had taken place in the night, a first in 1,000 days of Russian invasion.
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