Kenyan president William Ruto has urged world leaders to significantly step up their contributions to the global fight against climate change, describing the progress made over the past three decades as "incremental".
The climate crisis is "by far the defining issue of our era", Ruto told the Cop 28 UN climate summit in Dubai on 1 December. "The reality before us is irrefutable... According to the latest UN data, unless there is a significant and radical shift in our economic and industrial patterns, we are hurtling at a perilous velocity on a trajectory towards the dire scenario of a world that is warmer by 3°C [versus pre-industrial levels]," he said.
The Paris climate agreement, which the world continues to strive to deliver on, sets a goal to limit global warming to "well below 2°C" above pre-industrial averages, and preferably to 1.5°C.
"In just the first 10 months of this year, we experienced 86 days when temperatures soared 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels," Ruto said, adding that the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere continue to rise. "Global GHG emissions have not decreased, but rather increased by a deeply worrying 1.2pc between 2021 and 2022, culminating in a staggering 57.4 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent ꟷ a record high," he said.
The dual mission of Cop 28 must be to foster "radical co-operation" that helps steer the world firmly back onto the path for 1.5°C warming, and to reaffirm the global commitment to provide support, financial or otherwise, to the countries that need it most, according to Ruto.
"The vision demands deliberate support for developing countries," he said. "In the past two decades, only 2pc of the $3 trillion invested in global renewable energy has reached Africa, despite the continent's vase resource endowments and great need for investment."
Kenya, whose grid is already 92pc powered by renewables, has an ambitious plan to expand its renewable energy capacity to 100GW by 2050 from 3GW currently, but it needs financial support to achieve that.
"The consequences of this investment gap are starkly evident," Ruto said. "More than 600mn Africans are deprived of basic energy services."
