UN Climate Change High Level Champion for Egypt and UN Special Envoy on Financing 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda Mahmoud Mohieldin stressed the importance of the role of science to reach solutions to major challenges such as debt reduction and debt swap for investment in nature, as well as finding solutions to adaptation and resilience problems.
Mohieldin’s remarks came during his participation in a session entitled “The Sharm el-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda: An Opportunity to Accelerate the Transformation to Resilience” within the framework of the Youth and Science Day activities at the Climate Summit.
A number of representatives of the Climate champions team, Karen Sack, Director of the Alliance for Action on Resilience and Risks in Oceans, and Anna Asti, Undersecretary of Water Resources and Investments in Rio de Janeiro and Silvia Waps, advisor to the FAO, attended the session.
During his speech, Mohieldin stressed that the world is so far from achieving mitigation goals, which is the first line of defence, referring to the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which revealed instead of working to reduce carbon emissions by 45%, we added about 15 per cent to it , deviating from achieving the aspired goal by about 60%, and developing countries will bear the consequences and the largest cost of addressing it.
With regard to the issue of adaptation, the climate champion highlighted the importance of mobilizing science and technology in addition to investment, especially that 80% of climate finance is directed to mitigation and only 20 per cent is directed toward adaptation.
In the same context, Mohieldin highlighted the importance of the Sharm El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda, which supports adaptation measures in various sectors such as nature, water, planning, infrastructure and oceans within specific time frames.
Meanwhile, Mohieldin called for enhancing investment in data systems, which would contribute to doing better jobs as well as identifying financial gaps globally.
In this regard, Mohieldin referred to the Climate champions initiative ‘Race to Zero’ in order to support the lines of defence for adaptation and loss and damage.
He also referred to the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative, which was launched within the framework of the Climate Summit.
In another context, Mohieldin stressed the need to differentiate between the file of adaptation and the file of losses and damages, given that the policies of adaptation and its financing differ from those of losses and damages.
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