EU foreign ministers back UN call to raise climate ambition

(Climate Change News, 18 Feb 2019) A special UN summit scheduled in New York this September will provide “an essential opportunity to mobilise political will to raise global ambition” on climate change, according to an EU statement adopted on Monday.

Foreign ministers from the 28 EU members are met in Brussels on Monday, with international climate diplomacy high on the agenda.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has convened a global climate summit in New York on 23 September and Europe wants to use the opportunity to spur world nations into action on climate change.

“Climate change is a direct and existential threat, which will spare no country,” the EU statement warns, and its impacts already being felt across the globe.

“Yet action to stem it remains insufficient,” it adds, urging all countries to “join in this necessary raising of ambition”.

Guterres has already reached out to some G20 leaders to encourage them to step up their ambition. Countries such as China and Canada are expected to follow that call, raising the pressure on the US, which decided to pull out from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The statement by EU foreign ministers makes repeated references to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which for the first time charted pathways to limit the global rise in temperature to 1.5C, in line with the tougher target of the Paris Agreement.

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Climate Change News, 18 Feb 2019: EU foreign ministers back UN call to raise climate ambition