Madrid
A handful of major states resisted pres-sure on Sunday to ramp up efforts to combat global warming as a U.N. climate summit ground to a close, angering smaller countries and a growing protest movement that is pushing for emergency action. Carolina Schmidt, COP25 President and Chile’s Minister of Environment, speaks at the U.N. Cli-mate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain. The COP25 talks in Madrid were viewed as a test of governments’ collective will to heed the ad-vice of science to cut greenhouse gas emissions more rapidly, in order to prevent rising global tem-peratures from hitting irreversible tipping points.
But the conference, in its concluding draft, endorsed only a declaration on the ‘urgent need’ to close the gap between existing emissions pledges and the temperature goals of the landmark 2015 Paris cli-mate agreement – an outcome UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called disappointing. Many developing countries.—Reuters