Ex-UN climate chief doesn't see Paris-type moment in Glasgow
GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) — Christiana Figueres knows how to hammer out a climate deal, and she doesn’t expect the United Nations conference that just started in Glasgow to end with the kind of big moment she engineered in Paris six years ago. But she remains optimistic, saying failure “is not going to happen here.”
Figueres, the former executive secretary of the U.N.'s climate change program, was a key architect behind the historic 2015 Paris climate agreement. She says the negotiations leading to the two-week conference in Scotland have not progressed enough to reach the U.N.’s goals of cutting global greenhouse emissions in half from current levels and securing $100 billion a year in climate aid from rich nations to poor ones.
Those goals probably won’t be hit for another two years, but that’s OK, Figueres told The Associated Press.
“From a science perspective, we’re still in time, even if we do it in two years,” Figueres said in a late Sunday sit-down interview at the negotiations site. “From a political perspective, it is a disappointment for many, and I understand. So I do not celebrate it, but I think that we have a responsibility to be honest and to really understand the complexity of what we’re doing here.”
Asked if that means the negotiations will end in failure, like the U.N.'s 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen, she said: “It’s not going to happen here. No, no, no. There's actually been too much progress and too much has advanced for something like that.”
Figueres called the climate statements that came out of the two-day Group of 20 summit in Rome that ended Sunday “lackluster.” Still she said she looks at “where we are today, which is sizably much better than what we were in Paris six years ago.”
Knowing what details worked to make the historic Paris 2015...
