Andrew Norton is director of IIED
This week, US President Biden invites 40 world leaders to participate in the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate (Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
A new era in US climate politics will begin this week, as US President Joe Biden hosts the much-anticipated Leaders Summit on Climate on April 22-23. This follows a surge in US climate diplomacy in recent months, and speculation that the US will announce a new emissions reduction target at the summit. Alongside the more ambitious emissions reduction target announced by the UK on Tuesday, this will set a positive tone for mitigation discussions at the summit this week.
The East African
Friday April 16 2021
By NICHOLAS KAY
Climate change is the most important challenge facing future generations, but it is already a daily reality in East Africa despite the region bearing almost none of the historic responsibility for global emissions.
Over the past year alone, East Africa has seen drought in Somalia, landslides in Uganda, locust swarms destroying crops in Kenya and Ethiopia and floods across the region, including in Rwanda.
This is a critical year for collective action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. In November, the UK will host the UN climate change conference COP26, in Glasgow with our partners, Italy. This will provide an opportunity for the world to come together and commit to urgent action.
Colleagues,
2021 is a crucial year for people and planet. We face the interrelated challenges of a global health pandemic, accelerating biodiversity loss and escalating global warming and associated impacts. Rising to the occasion requires urgent action now, including in upcoming negotiations, recognising time is not on our side.
We know we must halve global emissions by 2030 if we are to keep the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C within reach. We must enhance the adaptive capacity of our societies and economies to reduce the impacts of climate change experienced, particularly by those most vulnerable. We must protect, restore and sustainably manage nature. And we must channel enhanced climate finance and align broader financial flows to accelerate climate action. Doing so will enable us to realise the immense benefits of a global transformation towards a net zero, climate-resilient future. Not doing so would be nothing short of catastrophic.
There is growing evidence that the coronavirus health crisis and our response to it are making developing countries, and vulnerable people and communities, suffer the most. Children, women, minorities, informal workers and the displaced are the most affected, according to the United Nations and the World Bank. Those fortunate enough to retain their jobs while working from home have consumed images of the extreme precarity faced by vulnerable people all over the world, including those of jobless migrant labourers walking back hundreds of miles in scorching heat to their villages in India. A recent Oxfam report termed the pandemic pathogen, ‘The Inequality Virus”, in that it has affected the rich temporarily but plunged millions globally into poverty. The head of the IMF has spoken of a “Great Divergence”- while rich countries that finance their own debt have spent over 20 percent of GDP to mitigate the impacts of the crisis, middle income and low-income countries have mobilise
April 9, 2021 – Toward a resilient recovery: My reflections on the World Bank Group’s Spring Meetings
World Bank Group President David Malpass at the 2021 Spring Meetings. Photo credit: World Bank Group
As the 2021 World Bank Group – IMF Spring Meetings come to a close, I was very pleased with strong support from all shareholders, the G7, G20, and Development Committee for the World Bank’s actions on climate, debt, vaccines, and other development priorities. The World Bank Group has acted quickly to help as many countries as possible respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While I am pleased with the speed, scale, and quality of the WBG’s activities, I feel no complacency about the challenges that lie ahead. It’s time to move urgently toward opportunities and solutions that achieve sustainable and broad-based economic growth, and it is our collective efforts on poverty, climate, and inequality that will be the defining choices of our age.