MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd December, 2020) The United Nations will next year focus mainly on building up a global coalition for carbon neutrality, which would be designed to promote the transition to renewable energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday.
"It is time to flick the 'green switch'. We have a chance to not simply reset the world economy but to transform it.� A sustainable economy driven by renewable energy will create new jobs, cleaner infrastructure and a resilient future ... The central objective of the United Nations for 2021 is to build a truly Global Coalition for Carbon Neutrality," Guterres said in his the State of the Planet speech.
The UN chief noted that the EU had committed to become the first climate neutral continent by 2050, while Japan and South Korea, among many others, had also committed to achieving carbon neutrality by the same year.
"This means that by early next year, countries representing more than 65 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions and more than 70 per cent of the world economy will have made ambitious commitments to carbon neutrality. We must turn this momentum into a movement," Guterres underlined.
Cutting down carbon dioxide is crucial for public health as it may curb the spread of infectious diseases, the secretary-general added, noting that "there is no vaccine for the planet."
The Paris accord, adopted in 2015 and signed a year later, is designed to boost greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation worldwide. Its main goals include keeping the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees in a bid to reduce the impact and risks of climate change. Under the deal, each participating country must determine and report regularly its efforts to mitigate global warming. It has no compliance mechanism.
