Talks between three of the largest parties still committed to the Paris Agreement opened on Monday, with EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra and ministers from Canada and China reaffirming their support for the 2015 climate pact.
The meeting between a trio representing two of the world’s three largest economies and nearly a third of global GDP presented an “opportunity to help shape what the next decade of climate action must deliver”, Hoekstra said in opening remarks on Monday.
Canada’s Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Nature, Julie Dabrusin, spoke of climate action being an “economic necessity” as well as a global obligation, and stressed the importance of demonstrating the “tangible impact” of climate action on citizens’ lives.
The meeting is the tenth such summit since, as China’s Minister for Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu recalled, President Trump first pulled the United States out of the global commitment to limit warming to as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible.
Huang spoke of the need to ensure the multilateralism diaplayed at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil last be maintained at the upcoming 31st round of UN talk in Turkey this autumn. The green transition was “irreversible”, he said.
Washington, absent
“This fully demonstrates the multilateral process will not stall or slow down due to the absence of individual countries,” Huang added.
The European Commission sees the tripartite talks as an “important milestone” on the road to COP31 in Antalya in November. Hoekstra and the two ministers were due to discuss the UN summit in closed session after the opening remarks.
They were also set to discuss climate finance – the transfer of wealth from the industrialised to the developing world, which has become one of the thorniest issues as the annual climate talks move from target-setting to the implementation phase.
Hoekstra, for one, has made no secret in recent years of his frustration with Beijing’s insistence that China remains a developing country despite three decades of economic growth while participating in the global climate process.
On Tuesday, the talks are set to address the issue of enabling a ‘just transition’ to a greener economy, and strengthening international climate cooperation.
“The more turbulent and unstable the world is, the more it proves standing on right side of history means adhering to and implementing the Paris Agreement,” Huang said.
(cs)
