Impact of corona crisis on climate negotiations
At the end of 2019, Leiden law student Aoife Fleming was elected UN Youth Representative for Sustainable Development. What impact is the corona crisis having on international climate negotiations?
It was recently announced that the 2020 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (UNFCCC COP 26) has been postponed in response to the measures to combat the coronavirus outbreak. On first sight the postponement is not disastrous, says Aoife on Duurzamestudent.nl.
'If countries were really prepared to take decisions that would trigger a serious change of direction, they would have done that at the first two conferences. But that’s not the full story. International pressure from civil society in on the rise. Reference was made to worldwide climate strikes several times at negotiation tables last year. Of course, these are just words, but in international politics words are something very important. And even though negotiations sometimes take far too long, global issues such as climate change can only be addressed by adopting a global approach.’
Read the full article (in Dutch) on Duurzamestudent.nl.