Climate change, conferences and despair

At the last climate conference, the UN states agreed to increase their reduction targets: By 2030, CO2 emissions are to be reduced by 45% compared to 2010, thus limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. At the moment, all indications are that this target will not be achieved.

Patricia Espinosa, UN Executive Secretary for Climate Change, warned at the opening in Bonn, "We urgently require political-level interventions and decisions because the world is going to have one question in Sharm El-Sheikh: What progress have you made since Glasgow?" It is not acceptable to say that we are in challenging times, she added..

The top UN climate official warned that climate change was proceeding exponentially and that the world was on track to more than double the Paris Agreement's target of 1.5 degrees by the end of the century. Extreme heat waves, like this one in India in May, would become more frequent as a result of man-made climate change.

Heavy rain and flooding, like here in the Brazilian Amazon, will also become more frequent. As Ralph Regenvanu, foreign minister of the island nation of Vanuatu, the world's most vulnerable country to natural disasters, puts it, "The richer countries can no longer deny that they have to deal with loss and damage."

Australia offers hope in this respect: the devastating forest fires of the past few years were one of the reasons why Prime Minister Scott Morrison's government, which was focused on the coal industry, was voted out of office. His successor Anthony Albanese has pledged to put the national response to climate change high on the agenda

A garbage collector in India stands on a landfill that has ignited itself due to the heat. Symbolically, one could say that the world community is in a similar situation. Patricia Espinosa, announcing the end of her term in Bonn, urged delegates: "Look at what we've accomplished in the last six years. Look at what we’ve accomplished in the last 30. But we can do better, we must."