The potential dismantling of US climate policies by the upcoming administration of president Donald Trump should not be an excuse for other parties to scale back their commitments, but to step up their climate efforts and target am ambitious new finance goal, non-governmental organisations said.
"It doesn't matter what happens in the White House, climate change is happening," said Carolina Pasquali, executive director at Greenpeace Brazil, at the UN's Cop 29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
NGOs still expect US president Joe Biden's administration to take leadership during negotiations at the summit and support a more ambitious new collective quantified goal (NCQG).
Podesta said yesterday in Baku that the US is "here to work and we are committed to a successful outcome". Talking about the new finance goal for developing countries he said: "We will continue to encourage people to work diligently to come up with a new funding formula". He noted that the goal needed to be "realistic".
"With the anticipated absence of climate leadership from the US for the next four years, there has never been a more critical need for global climate action," said Federica Bietta, managing director at the Coalition for Rainforest Nations.
But instead of being worried about a potential scale back in commitments from other countries or a failure in negotiations for a new finance goal, NGOs are pushing for leaders of rich nations to support global solidarity and accountability.
"The global north owes the global south a climate debt," said Tasneem Essop, executive director at the Climate Action Network (CAN).
"We really need to see the EU, Australia, Canada and other rich countries to step up because no one nation should be able to hold the world hostage," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
