Amina Mohammed: "We have created a favorable environment in terms of climate action"
Audio 05:27
UN Under-Secretary-General Amina Mohammed on March 8, 2017 in New York City.
AFP
By: Carrie Nooten Follow
12 mins
Relaunching the battle on the climate, this is what the United Nations hope, France - host country of the Paris Climate Agreement which is five years old this Saturday - and Great Britain, which is organizing today a virtual summit called “climate ambition”.
To talk about the number 2 of the UN, Amina Mohammed is our guest, at the microphone of our correspondent in New York, Carrie Nooten.
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80 heads of state and government are expected to take part in this virtual summit.
Six of the top ten polluting countries will be represented: China, India, the European Union, Canada, Japan and the United States.
RFI: Madame Mohammed, what do you expect from this summit of climate ambition? Why is it so important to organize it now?
Amina Mohammed
: The pinnacle of climate ambition is the commemoration of the
Paris Agreement, five years later
.
And this is an important year, while the COP 26 has been postponed to 2021. And it is also the time to take stock, to know where we are with contributions, public funding, that of companies, of the promises and commitments that were made.
And to share all this with the whole world, with the actors who will be at this meeting… Because there will be much more than the governments who will be involved.
What can we expect from the UN? Are you going to ask for new goals to be set up?
We start from the speech on the state of the planet that the secretary general gave a few days ago;
he will recall that the objectives taken a few years ago must be achieved.
Carbon neutrality must be targeted for 2050. We have many countries that have already committed to it, but many others have yet to do so.
So, we are going to create this movement for carbon neutrality.
He will say “
take the Covid as an opportunity!
"
The Covid
is a crisis, a health crisis, a socio-economic crisis, but he will also say that it is an opportunity - for today's stimulus plans to invest in a green recovery.
We will address the issue of funding, we will ask to finance as many mitigation measures as adaptation.
And of course, we will appeal to countries for their contributions.
We are already working with the climate plans of 120 countries, and we would like them to have even bigger short-term ambitions, in order to be sure to achieve carbon neutrality in 2050, and limited global warming. at 1.5 degrees.
And from the point of view of the United Nations, is it easier to push in this context towards these objectives now, or on the contrary more difficult? A few weeks ago, the secretary general said he was disappointed with the emissions despite everything ...
It is true that the commitments made are not always followed by action.
And come to think of it, we would have liked more environmental announcements to be made when we waited for a global response to this virus that has put the planet on “
pause
”.
In terms of climate action, we would have liked to see many more new decisions made, and that did not happen.
But we are now beginning to see that a favorable environment has been created, which pushes companies to transform their portfolios of activities into “
green
”.
Let us talk with governments about transitions, just transitions.
Because there is indeed a public, political discussion that evokes the suffering of people, the struggling economies, and that is why we will have to find the just transition.
We are not only going to close economies and go green, we agree to transitions, but they must be put in place now, and they must be ambitious.
And we need to find a way to communicate about the number of jobs that can be created, discussions of the green transition for solar energy, for example, or when we are talking about phasing out coal, detailing how shut down coal-fired power plants.
So yeah, I think it's a challenge, it's always been a challenge.
And let me tell you, too, bands matter!
The youth group is huge!
And this group has really helped us target actors, target companies, target governments.
And they tell them very loudly: "
You cannot mortgage our future today
!"
Today is the day you need to invest in our ambition to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
You have just returned from a trip to West Africa. What did you work on during this trip
?
During my trip to Africa, I visited northeastern Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Sierra Leone and Ghana.
In northeast Nigeria I could see that there was a huge problem with Lake Chad.
Its drying up is really climate change before your eyes.
It caused the displacement of millions of civilians - and it was exacerbated by the conflict.
But I saw the opportunity for us to rebuild “
green
”.
See that where there are islands of stability, where Boko Haram has been pushed back, there are villages, especially women and young people, who can revive agriculture.
And this whole sustainable value chain can get smarter.
We can connect projects to the best financing, and make the markets more efficient.
I was in Niger, it is clear here that stopping CO2 emissions will go through their mitigation.
The damage that was caused by the extreme weather episodes - they have never seen floods like this in Niger - will make it necessary to finance adaptations.
This is necessary, because CO2 emissions alone have caused serious damage to the climate.
The international community will have to be Niger's partner.
If we go to Mali, there is a transition in Mali.
This transition is exacerbated by climate change.
And we must therefore activate climate actions in the north of the country, where terrorism is still very present.
The underground community is very important there.
And we would have to see if we could not make a big investment in the Great Green Wall, which passes through Mali, which would create an economic corridor, which would not only be ecological, but which would create jobs, islands of stability, that would push back conflicts.
Because peace would take over.
Peace re-establishes itself when you invest in a green calendar.
And that's how I observed climate change when I was there: I looked at how, by taking climate initiatives, we can change the roots of conflict, of poverty or of women and children finding themselves at the center of the disaster of the Covid crisis.
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