The Covid-19 pandemic has been devastating for our world, and it has not affected countries equally. Developing countries, with weaker health systems and many of whose health professionals migrate to wealthier countries, have suffered a huge burden in deaths and illness. This is now compounded by the inequitable access to vaccines.
The Covid-19 crisis hit just as we had come to a fuller realisation of the climate crisis, and the vital importance of changing course to a 1.5˚C world and restoring global loss of biodiversity. But will we see the necessary ambition at COP15 on Biological Diversity in China in October, and at COP26 in Glasgow in November?
Behind closed doors, shipbuilders and miners can speak on behalf of governments while regulating an industry that pollutes as much as all of America’s coal plants.
President Joe Biden’s two-day climate change summit, which was timed to coincide with Earth Day in the US and continues tomorrow, is intended to rebuild bridges with most of world that were damaged by four years of Donald Trump’s climate-denial policies. However, it also looks likely to burn a few bridges as well.
Biden took executive action on his first day in office to reverse the Trump withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and announced a virtual ‘Leaders Summit on Climate’ to galvanise a global effort to tackle the climate crisis.
Along with domestic policy reversals, Biden is looking to use the meeting to burnish American claims to leadership again on this critical international issue. In support of this aim, critics as well as proponents of international action have been included.