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Jakarta urges G20 action on climate change

Senior officials from the G20 major economies are meeting for climate talks on the resort island of Bali, with Indonesia urging joint action to cut emissions.

Passengers wait by a damaged road next to floods, in Bahrain, Pakistan. (Naveed Ali/AP)

Wildfires in the forests of eastern Algeria have killed at least 26 people and countless animals, according to a report by the north African country’s interior minister. (Mohamed Ali/AP)

A farmer stands in the basin of a community reservoir in Longquan village in southwest China that is nearly empty due to hot weather and drought. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

Dead fish lay on the dried-up bed of the river Tille in Lux, France, an area that is normally a lush, green region. (Nicholas Garriga/AP)

August 31, 2022

By AAP

31 August 2022

Officials from the Group of 20 major economies are meeting for climate talks on the resort island of Bali, with host Indonesia warning that failure to work together to cut emissions will push the planet toward “uncharted territory”.

Indonesia’s Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said on Wednesday that countries must jointly arrest global warming or see the planet pushed to a point “where no future will be sustainable”.

“It is our responsibility to the be part of the solution. We build bridges, not walls,” she said.

“Climate security has become synonymous with energy security and the chronic threat of climate change is not going away.”
Alok Sharma, president of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference

The G20 climate meeting comes as extreme weather events – fires, floods and heatwaves – pummel parts of the world, including unprecedented flooding in Pakistan in recent weeks that has killed at least 1000 people.

Scientists say most such extreme weather events are attributable to human-caused climate change and will only increase in severity and frequency as the globe edges closer to the warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry is among delegates at a G20 climate meeting in Bali. (Evan Vucci/Reuters)

Environment officials from Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, and US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry are attending the talks in Bali, and are expected to produce a joint communique later on Wednesday.

Indonesia as current G20 chair has invited representatives from the African Union to join the talks for the first time, said Siti, adding that voices from all countries, regardless of their wealth and size, must be heard.

Also in attendence is Alok Sharma, president of last year’s 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), who said the war in Ukraine had increased the urgency of a shift to renewable sources of energy. The COP27 climate summit will be held in Egypt this November.

“The current energy crisis has demonstrated the vulnerability of countries relying on fossil fuels controlled by hostile actors,” he said on Tuesday.