No option but to keep fighting climate change, says European Climate Foundation

The world has no option but to keep fighting climate change, says Laurence Tubiana, a climate change expert from France and CEO of the European Climate Foundation. She was speaking at a webinar today on what to expect from the next round of climate talks – the COP25 meeting – which begins in Madrid on December 2.

Replying to a question of Business Line on whether the world is fighting a battle already lost, in the context of the recently-released Emissions Gap Report that speaks of rising trend in global greenhouse gas emissions, Tubiana said that “it is not a question of being optimistic or pessimistic”. “We have to accelerate the movement.”

Tubiana is a former France’s Climate Change Ambassador and Special Representative at the COP21 meeting that was held in Paris in December 2015 and as such was a key architect of the Paris Agreement.

“The only solution is to continue….we need to push. If we stop, it will be even worse,” she said.

In her opening remarks, Tubiana observed that not all countries were moving in the right direction. She noted that China had a huge pipeline of coal power projects and that the United States was a divided house.

On a question about the creation of carbon market, which is expected to figure in the Madrid conference, Tubiana said that carbon markets were important but not crucial. “The space for carbon markets and offsets is not that big,” she said.