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Nothing will change on climate until death toll rises in west, says Gabonese minister
(The Guardian, 31 Oct 2022) Before Cop27, Lee White also says broken promises on funding leave sense of betrayal.
The world will only take meaningful action on the climate crisis once people in rich countries start dying in greater numbers from its effects, Gabon’s environment minister has said, while warning that broken promises on billions of dollars of adaptation finance have left a “sense of betrayal” before Cop27.
Lee White said governments were not yet behaving as if global heating was a crisis, and he feared for the future he was leaving to his children. He said the $100bn of promised climate finance from rich nations was not reaching poor countries, which was driving distrust in the UN climate process.
The UN has framed Cop27, which begins next week in Sharm el-Sheikh, as “the Africa climate conference”, and loss and damage finance for countries experiencing the worst consequences of global heating will be a key issue.
“With everything that’s happened in the last year in the Horn of Africa and Pakistan – those places really count,” White said. “But with the once-in-a-500-year drought in Europe, fires in France, and the New York subway becoming Niagara Falls, we might be at a point where things are getting bad enough that developed nations start taking the climate more seriously.
The Guardian, 31 Oct 2022: Nothing will change on climate until death toll rises in west, says Gabonese minister
