PARIS, France: Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif will arrive here on Sunday to represent Pakistan at the 21st UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) being held in the French capital from November 30 to December 11, to reach a new global deal to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse emissions.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will deliver his speech on November 30, the opening day of the two-week event, which is scheduled to attended and addressed by over 140 world leaders including US President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
The Prime Minister, who in his statement is expected to highlight Pakistan’s efforts in tackling the climate change challenges, will also join the world leaders at a lunch to be hosted by French President Francois Hollande in the honour of the heads of state and government.
Despite the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, the Organizers were committed to go ahead with the event as planned. The main events of the COP21 are taking place at Le Bourget, outside the city center, where French authorities have taken stringent security measures to help keep the site safe.
Global efforts to tackle climate change have been going on since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established, agreeing the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change.
Annual summits, or `Conferences of the Parties’ to the UNFCCC, have been held every year since 1995 – making Paris the 21st, hence COP21. The Kyoto summit in 1997 resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, a legally-binding deal to cut emissions for the period 2008-2012, but it only applied to developed countries.
The Copenhagen summit in 2009 was the last time that the world leaders met with the expectation of agreeing a binding global deal, which they hoped would cover emissions cuts from 2012, but that summit ended in acrimony. However, negotiators are hopeful things will be different this time.
According to the UN, national pledges to cut emissions made ahead of the Paris summit are likely to leave the world on course for warming of at least 2.7 C. That will make a significant “dent” in the warming that might otherwise be seen, but not enough to prevent dangerous warming.
However, the aim is to also agree a framework that will make countries improve those pledges in time, as well as setting a long-term goal that is consistent with limiting warming to 2 Degree Centigrade.
As part of the global efforts to check gas emissions, Pakistan was also playing its role and taking policy measures.
Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif recently approved the national carbon emission reduction strategy, which was later submitted to the United Nations Convention Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) by the Ministry of Climate Change.
20th session of the Conference of the Parties of UNFCCC held last December in Lima required all its Parties to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) the kind of commitments, contributions, and actions that Parties are considering to undertake in the period beyond 2020-2030 to achieve the objectives of the Convention.
According to the officials of Climate Change Ministry, though Pakistan country is amongst lowest emitters and accounts for less than 1% of the total global carbon emissions, it remains committed to the global efforts to reduce climate-altering carbon emission to tackle global warming and its impacts by adopting low-carbon development pathways particularly in energy, agriculture, transport.
Pakistan’s INDC is rooted in Pakistan Vision 2025, which is a roadmap of economic growth, social inclusion and sustainable development aimed at transforming the country into a vibrant and prosperous nation by 2025.
Pakistan believes that all countries have a role to play in addressing climate change and that its contribution is fair and ambitious given its national circumstances. Pakistan will continue to push for a global agreement that addresses the challenges we face in a timeline that is necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change.
And at the same time, the developed countries would mobilize adequate funding and technology transfer to enable the developing countries to achieve INDCs, the officials remarked.
Source: APP
