India: Dr. Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and COP28 President-Designate, and Mr. Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), have urged G20 nations to adopt a greater leadership role in climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The leaders issued a joint statement on the sidelines of the G20 ministerial meeting in Chennai, India, calling on the countries to “lead the way” in delivering a positive outcome on mitigation at the COP28 climate conference in 2023.
“The science demands a strong mitigation outcome at COP28 that drives a significant reduction in emissions and builds on the progress of previous COPs, and we call on the G20 to lead the way on the basis of both science and equity and lay the path to a strong and credible outcome that provides developing countries with the basis to undertake a just transition,” the leaders said in the statement.
According to the leaders, countries must take the necessary steps to accelerate the inevitable phase-down of all fossil fuels in a responsible manner in order to have an energy system free of unabated fossil fuels by the middle of this century while enabling access for all and promoting sustainable development.
“It is our hope that any progress achieved by the G20 drives decisively a strong outcome at COP28 under the Global Stocktake and capitalises on the Just Transition Work Program established at COP27 to ensure that this transition is fair, leaves no one behind, and supports the broad development challenges faced by developing countries in launching this transition,” the statement added.
The leaders further called upon G20 nations to raise the importance of defining a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) and operationalizing the loss and damage fund and funding arrangements “to an equal level, to ensure that the human face of climate change is at the centre of all our decisions.”