ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka will sit out the international climate summit, Conference of Parties, in future if there continues to be a lack of cohesion in solutions to tackle climate change among world leaders, President Ranil Wickremesinghe said.
“The global community has still not been able to come together on an agreement of how we are to deal with the challenges. From COP meeting to COP meeting we have gone there, and there is a lot of talk. But unfortunately, there has been no agreement,” Wickremesinghe said at Code Red climate summit organized by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce.
“I don’t think we can go on and on meeting like this. In the next two meetings either we must come to some agreement or give this up. That’s what Sri Lanka plans to tell the COP.”
The President said that the funding that Sri Lanka was awaiting from the Conference of Parties held in Glasgow in 2021, was not received.
“The funds that we are waiting for were promised from Glasgow, somewhere it’s either [that the] money got lost or it never left the bank. That unfortunately happens to be the story of funding. We need that funding. But the money hasn’t turned up.”
“Why are we waiting for this money to come? We see for instance in the last few weeks a fairly large chunk of money being voted by the US Congress to help Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. The EU is also voting money to help Ukraine. That may be in the range of about 100 billion.”
“All this must be coming to about 150 to 200 billion. Just imagine what that can do. We went from one Conference of Party to another Conference of Party. We were promised all this money. We are standing watching for it and all of a sudden all this money goes into Ukraine.”
Wickremesinghe said developing nations need to mobilise financing on their own, and that the private sector could invest in commercial development of environmental projects, as an alternative to the country depending on development aid to invest in climate risk mitigation projects.
“Remember that this world, developing world has to put up a fight. We must do all we can to develop it commercially. If the money is not coming to us as aid for development, take the money for commercial development of the environmental projects.”
Agreeing on the President’s sentiment, Anurabha Ghosh, founder-CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a climate think-tank said that developed nations themselves have fallen short on their climate targets, along with those laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“The fact that we have less than a decade left, less than for the remaining carbon spaces, stay within 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, sits uncomfortably with the fact that the developed countries are well short of their own targets of meeting their NDC targets by 2030, which target themselves are well short of what the IPCC says they need to do.”
“So during this decade alone, the developed countries will end up consuming another 3.5 gigatons or billion tons of carbon space that could have been made available for the developing world. So, the short answer is: No one’s coming to help us. We’ve got to figure it out on our own. How do we do that?”
He said that countries should incorporate both adaptation to and mitigation of climate risks in their modelling of projects for climate risk mitigation.
“I propose to you that we have to, like a Star Wars movie, focus on R2-D2. We need to balance risk with resilience and decarbonization with development. Marrying adaptability with mitigation.” (Colombo/May8/2024)