‘The war has not ended’: Prof Saleemul Huq says developed countries don’t want to give anything

Professor Saleemul Huq has described the negotiations at the UN climate summit as a “war”, saying the developed countries do not want to give the climate-vulnerable nations anything.

“They don’t want to give anything of what we want. They want to block everything. But we will continue our efforts to make them pledge until the end,” the Bangladeshi scientist said in an interview with bdnews24.com from Glasgow in the final hours of negotiations at the COP26 summit on Friday.

Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, has attended every one of the 26 COP meetings held since the first in Berlin, in 1995.

Emissions cuts promised by the world's biggest climate polluters so far will add up to a dangerous 2.7-degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures -- far above the more ambitious 1.5C goal of the Paris deal, backed by scientists.

Wealthy countries that promised to deliver $100 billion a year in funding from 2020 to help poorer, vulnerable nations grow cleanly and adapt to climate threats - an urgent priority this decade - now say they will not meet that goal until 2023.

As the talks in Glasgow hurtled toward the closing hours, a new draft agreement released Friday morning called for a doubling of money to help developing countries cope with climate impacts, and called on nations to strengthen their emissions-cutting targets by next year.

But much of the text in the draft — intended to push negotiators toward a deal that all nations can agree on — remained contentious for many countries. Disputes remain over money, the speed of emissions cuts and indeed whether an agreement should even mention “fossil fuels” — the principal cause of climate change, but a term that has never before appeared in a global climate agreement.

The differences, after nearly two weeks of negotiations, signalled that it would be difficult for negotiators to reach the sort of sweeping agreement that activists and scientists had urged before the start of the United Nations talks. Scientific consensus says that the world must slash greenhouse-gas emissions by nearly half by 2030 in order to stave off the most disastrous effects of global warming. But under countries’ current targets, emissions would continue to rise.

Asked about possibilities of reaching an agreement on these issues, Prof Huq said, “We will try until the end. The war has not ended. We won’t give up now.”

The United States and China unveiled a deal to ramp up cooperation tackling climate change, including by cutting methane emissions, phasing out coal consumption and protecting forests on Wednesday.

A joint China-US declaration on climate change is a political reset to a time when the world's two biggest carbon emitters reached the brief meeting of minds that helped forge the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But that still won't be enough to avert a deepening climate crisis, unless Washington and Beijing can match words with more action to curb fossil fuels and prod others at the COP26 talks in Glasgow to do the same.

Prof Huq welcomed the latest deal, but said questions remained unanswered. “China and the US are big polluters. It’s good if they agree to work together. But the announcement does not have details. We don’t know what has happened actually.”

He said the delegates and negotiators of Bangladeshi, one of the countries that are most vulnerable to climate impacts, presented their views at both private and public levels of the talks.  

“The main thing is negotiation – what we can achieve from different governments. It’s not easy to take something as the rich nations do not want to give something easily. This is the war.”   

[With details from Reuters and The New York Times]