UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan will attend the COP27 UN climate change conference in Egypt, reports WAM.
The UAE President will be joined by world leaders including US President Joe Biden, Brazil’s recent election winner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and UK PM Rishi Sunak at the gathering in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The aim of the conference is for countries to engage in focussed constructive dialogue aimed at addressing the global climate change emergency.
UAE will highlight progress at Cop27
President Sheikh Mohamed will lead the delegation from the UAE at Cop27 as the country looks to highlight its sustainable development partnerships.
Ahead of the visit to Cop27 President Sheikh Mohamed and US President Joe Biden discussed a recently signed $100bn energy deal between the two nations.
The UAE-US Partnership for Accelerating Clean Energy (PACE) will see $100bn in funding and investment to deploy 100 new gigawatts of clean energy in the US, UAE, and emerging economies around the world by 2035.
Top of the agenda will see countries highlighting progress on the so-called Paris Agreement.
The 2015 agreement, signed at COP21, 194 countries agreed to work towards agreed targets to reduce emission targets. The agreement sets long-term goals to guide all nations:
- Substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5 degrees;
- Review countries’ commitments every five years; and
- Provide financing to developing countries to mitigate climate change, strengthen resilience and enhance abilities to adapt to climate impacts.
President Sheikh Mohamed will highlight the significant progress made by the UAE since it became the first country in the Middle East to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement and commit to lowering its carbon emissions.
Following Cop27, the conference will be held in the UAE next year and the UAE will lead an ambitious, inclusive and solutions-oriented approach to the global climate summit in 2023, a senior minister dealing with the country’s preparations for hosting COP28 said.
Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Chairman of the Higher Committee overseeing the COP28 preparations, said the country would also work closely with Egypt, which will host the upcoming COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh in November, to support momentum for greater climate progress.
The minister’s announcements came after the fourth meeting of the COP28 UAE Higher Committee, which discussed all strategic, technical and administrative elements related to the summit.
Climate change is a serious crisis facing the world, according to 8 out of 10 UAE residents surveyed by management consultancy firm Kearney.
The study, published ahead of the UN Cop27 conference held in Egypt this month, also revealed that 70% of people think urgent action is needed in the next five years to minimise the impact and secure a sustainable future.
Most people in the UAE said that addressing climate change issues would have a positive impact on social issues, with 81% believing that climate change has a deep impact on the livelihoods of people in different countries.
Mauricio Zuazua, Partner at Kearney Middle East, said: “In the past decade, countries in the Middle East region have made sustainability and energy transition a national priority.
“We’ve seen commitments such as the UAE Net Zero 2050 and the KSA Net Zero 2060 come into place to combat climate change at a national level, and a number of clean energy initiatives.”
The UAE Net Zero by 2050 strategic initiative is a national drive to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, making the country the first in the Middle East and North Africa to do so.
50% of residents believe the country is on the right track to achieving this target, with 73% highlighting that corporates have a significant role to play in driving this. More than half (56%) believe corporations need to do more to slow down climate change, and 72% state that new technologies should be implemented to mitigate the climate crisis.
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