At the Summit of the COP26 which is currently being held in Glasgow, the Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, made an alarming inventory of the consequences of climate change for her country.
Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan addressing a leaders’ debate on solidarity at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland
Complaints of Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu at COP26
“We know what is required and we know that if the world will not act accordingly, the countries like ours with lower adaptive capacity have no option but to brace for more devastating impacts. Our pride, the Mount Kilimanjaro, is drastically becoming bald due to glacier melting,” Samia complains.
“Our exotic and beautiful archipelago, Zanzibar, is struggling with temperature rises, saltwater intrusion and inundat-ion, thus impacting its tourism ecology. What does all this mean to a poor country like Tanzania?”, She added.
” It means 30% of our GDP (gross domestic product) that comes from agriculture, forestry and fisheries is not sustainable.”
Tanzanian President on Tuesday during her COP26 speech in Glascow, called on developed countries to fulfill climate finance goals of donating 100 billion US dollars by 2025 to facilitate the implementation of the Paris Agreement.
The President of Tanzania criticised advanced societies” for “lagging behind” while developing nations like her own showed leadership in the fight against climate change
“We know what is required and we know that if the world will not act accordingly, the countries like ours with lower adaptive capacity have no option but to brace for more devastating impacts. Our pride, the Mount Kilimanjaro, is drastically becoming bald due to glacier melting. Our exotic and beautiful archipelago, Zanzibar, is struggling with temperature rises, saltwater intrusion and inundat-ion, thus impacting its tourism ecology. What does all this mean to a poor country like Tanzania? It means 30% of our GDP (gross domestic product) that comes from agriculture, forestry and fisheries is not sustainable.”
In 2009, developed countries agreed to raise 100 billion US dollars per year by 2020 to help the developing world deal with the fallout from a warming planet.
The latest available estimates from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (show that the funding hit 79.6 billion US dollars in 2019, just two per cent more than the preceding year.
Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan arrives for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 1
What you need to know about COP26
COP is short for the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change, which is an event that takes place annually, though it was postponed last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic. World leaders do attend, but a lot of the discussions take place among ministers and other high-level officials working on climate issues. The 26 signifies that this is the group’s 26th meeting.
The conferences are massive events with a lot of side meetings that attract people from the business sector, fossil fuel companies, climate activists and other groups with a stake in the climate crisis. Some of them are successful — the Paris Agreement was hammered out during COP21, for example — and some are painfully unproductive.
More than 190 countries signed onto the Paris Agreement after the COP21 meeting in 2015, to limit the increase in global temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but preferably to 1.5 degrees.
Half a degree may not sound like a huge difference, but scientists say any additional warming past 1.5 degrees will trigger more intense and frequent climate extremes. For example, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees instead of 2 degrees could result in around 420 million fewer people being frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves, according to the UN.
Scientists see 2 degrees as a critical threshold where extreme weather would render some of the world’s most densely populated areas into uninhabitable deserts or flood them with sea water.
Although the Paris Agreement was a landmark moment in the quest to address the climate crisis, it didn’t include details on how the world would achieve its goal. The subsequent COPs have sought to make the plans attached to it more ambitious and to detail courses of action.
“On paper, the Paris Agreement was always designed as a cyclical process — ‘see you in five years, with better plans and renewed efforts,'” said Lola Vallejo, the climate program director at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. “So right now, we are at this deadline, pushed back by Covid.”
These are the goals for the COP26 climate summit
Alok Sharma — a British lawmaker and the COP26 President — has said he wants this year’s conference to reach agreement on a number of key targets, including:
- Keeping the goal of “1.5 alive,” which can involve anything from reaching net zero by mid-century to slashing greenhouse gases more aggressively over this decade.
- Putting an end date on the use of coal, which G20 leaders failed to agree on in Rome. Leaders talk about ending “unabated” coal, which means some coal could continue to be used if the greenhouse gas emissions from it are removed.
- Providing $100 billion in annual climate financing, which wealthy nations agreed to do by 2020 to help developing countries transition to low-carbon economies and adapt to the impacts of the crisis.
- Making all new car sales zero emissions within 14-19 years.
- Ending and reversing deforestation by the end of the decade, as forests play a crucial role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
- Reducing emissions from methane, a potent gas with more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. The US and EU are leading a pledge to slash 30% of methane emissions by 2030.
