Talks between the three biggest economies still committed to the Paris Agreement opened on Monday, with the EU’s Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra and ministers from Canada and China reaffirming their support for the 2015 climate pact.
The meeting between a trio representing two of the world’s three largest economies and nearly a third of global GDP presented an “opportunity to help shape what the next decade of climate action should deliver,” Hoekstra said in opening remarks Monday.
Canada’s Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Nature, Julie Dabrusin, spoke of climate action as an “economic imperative” as well as a global obligation and emphasized the importance of demonstrating the “tangible impact” of climate action in the lives of citizens.
The meeting is the tenth such summit since, as China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu recalled, President Trump first withdrew the United States from the global commitment to limit warming to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Huang spoke of the need to ensure that the multilateralism displayed at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil is preserved for the last time at the upcoming 31st round of UN talks in Turkey this fall. The green transition was “irreversible,” he said.
Washington, absent
“This fully shows that the multilateral process will not stall or slow down due to the lack of individual countries,” Huang added.
The European Commission sees the tripartite talks as an “important milestone” on the way to COP31 in Antalya in November. Hoekstra and the two ministers were to discuss the UN summit in closed session after the opening remarks.
They also set out to discuss climate finance – the transfer of wealth from the industrialized world to the developing world, which has become one of the sharpest issues as the annual climate talks move from goal-setting to the implementation phase.
Hoekstra, for example, has made no secret in recent years of his frustration with Beijing’s insistence that China remain a developing country despite three decades of participation in the global climate process.
On Tuesday, the talks are set to address the issue of enabling a ‘just transition’ to a greener economy and strengthening international climate cooperation.
“The more turbulent and unstable the world is, the more you try to stay on the right side of history means adhering to and implementing the Paris Agreement,” Huang said.
(cs)
