Petersberg Climate Dialogue: UN call for stronger cooperation

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning to senior officials from 40 countries attending a two-day meeting in Berlin to discuss how to tackle climate change and its effects. Addressing the 13th Petersberg Climate Dialogueon Monday,the UN chief called on political leaders to meet their international climate finance promises and “take responsibility for our collective future”.The two-day informal ministerial meet was chaired by Germany and Egypt, hosts of this year’s annual climate meet (COP-27). He said the limit of 1.5°C agreed in the 2015 Paris climate accord was slipping further out of reach even as more people around the world are hit by extreme floods, droughts, storms and wildfires. “Nations continue to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future,” he said. “We cannot continue this way. We must rebuild trust and come together — to keep 1.5 alive and to build climate-resilient communities. Promises made must be promises kept. We need to move forward together on all fronts. Mitigation. Adaptation. Finance. Loss and Damage”, he said. 
The 13th Petersberg Climate Dialogue, co-chaired by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El Sisi and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, hosted open discussions in small groups on the big issues in international climate policy. The informal ministerial meet proposes to build consensus and provide political direction to resolve divergences aimed at improving implementation of climate action, the core goal of COP-27. According to media reports, during the dialogue, ministers and delegations from several countries recalled the urgency to move to the implementation of all the previous resolutions made during the last meeting in order to limit global warming.
As per the previous resolution, the fight against climate change requires the preservation of the Congo Basin forests, which alone absorb 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon globally per year. The Petersberg Climate Dialogue will pave the way for a successful global climate conference in Egypt in November. Since its inception in 2010, the Petersberg Dialogue has served as a forum for ministers to build political consensus that help resolve differences on issues holding up progress in negotiations.

In his address, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi confirmed that the upcoming UN Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP27(, which will be held in Sharm El-Sheikh this November, aims to be a milestone in international action towards turning promises into actual implementation on the ground. Al-Sisi said that all scientific estimates and reports clearly confirm that climate change has become an existential threat to many countries and societies around the world in such a way that it is no longer possible to postpone the implementation of pledges and commitments related to global climate.