Governments must not let the coronavirus pandemic derail action on climate change, an architect of the landmark Paris Agreement has warned, saying the vulnerabilities laid bare by the virus could serve to spur a more concerted response.
Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat who was instrumental in brokering the 2015 United Nations sponsored Paris Agreement aimed at averting catastrophic global warming, said the disruption caused by the coronavirus, COVID19, was a wake-up call.
“In a way, it’s a lesson: viruses don’t respect borders, climate change doesn’t respect borders,” Ms Tubiana, who continues to closely track climate diplomacy, told an online briefing reported by Reuters Newsagency.
“If we do not manage the climate crisis it will be the same.”
Ms Tubiana was speaking amid mounting concerns that the economic disruption caused by the coronavirus could tempt governments to shy away from the massive effort to cut carbon emissions needed to stabilise the Earth’s climate system.
UN officials say plans are still in place to hold a major summit, COP26, in Glasgow in November, the most important since the Paris Agreement was struck.
However,, preliminary meetings have been cancelled, postponed or moved online until the end of April and the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come under some pressure to postpone the COP26 meeting.
“I think it’s a bit premature to speak about postponement,” said a spokesman for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which oversees climate negotiations, referring to the Glasgow summit.
Reuters report nearly 200 countries pledged to curb their national emissions under the Paris Agreement, but they need to radically toughen their pledges to avoid temperature increases that scientists say could render swathes of the planet uninhabitable.
“The climate crisis hasn’t gone away,” said Ms Tubiana, who now heads the European Climate Foundation, a non-profit organisation, adding that the virus had shown the “vulnerability of the international system in a very, very violent way.”
Climate campaigners are also concerned over the possible fate of an EU-China summit due to take place in Germany in September, seen as an important opportunity to coordinate action on emissions.
A preparatory EU-China summit that had been due to take place in Beijing later this month has already been postponed, the European Commission confirmed on Tuesday.
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