The Climate Summit (COP24) begins, with the official inauguration in Katowice (Poland), where meetings and complex negotiations will take place over the next two weeks with the aim of finding the formulas to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement. The agreement urges to curb global warming by drastically cutting polluting emissions, EFEverde reports.
The COP24, considered the most important summit since the Paris meeting, will tackle the great planetary threats. As for the inaugural act, the absence of world leaders was the dominant note, although with exceptions. Pedro Sánchez President of the Spanish Government, who was present at the start of the COP24, has advanced that Spain will set more ambitious goals in reducing emissions and, thus, it is proposed to reduce current levels by 37% by 2030 and reach a reduction by at least 90% in 2050.
Sánchez participated in the inaugural session of the Climate Change summit, accompanied by his Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera. In his speech, the President advocated the need to act more quickly with measures to reduce emissions and against climate change.
During the opening, all the participants emphasized the importance of taking decisive steps against climate change. The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, recalled that it is necessary to “mobilize resources as soon as possible to mitigate the advance of climate change”, and insisted on the “opportunity that the transition to an economic model that respects the environment offers”. In line with the United Nations message, Guterres, focused his intervention on conveying the message to the global society that a change to the green economy is something positive that will generate new avenues of business, employment and welfare.
The president of the host country, Andrzej Duda, advocated the fight against climate change, with the limit of the national sovereignty of each country and its free disposition over its own energy resources. “The use of our own natural resources, in the case of Poland the coal, and the energy security that this brings us is not in conflict with the protection of the climate and the progress towards a more active climate policy,” Duda said during his address before the plenary session, where he distanced himself from the rest of the leaders who support without hesitation the reduction of the use of fuels such as coal.
Poland still depends by 80% on coal to produce its energy, but aims to reduce its weight to 60% by 2030 and 30% by 2040, taking as a reference the 1990 levels, thanks to an energy policy based on renewable sources and nuclear energy (with the connection to the network in 2033 of the first of the six planned plants).
