The war in the Middle East has "further locked in much higher fossil fuel costs for months and likely years to come", UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive secretary Simon Stiell said today.
The war is "delivering a gut punch" to every country, he told ministers from more than 40 countries during the opening of the closed-door 17th Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin.
"Fossil-fuel driven stagflation is now stalking economies — driving up prices, driving down growth, pushing budgets deeper into quagmires of debt, and stripping away governments' policy options and autonomy," he said, adding that climate co-operation was key to fight global heating and "fossil fuel cost chaos".
He urged ministers to turn commitments into projects and to match targets with solutions.
The Alliance of Small Island states (Aosis) said the case for advancing to more sustainable energy sources "has never been more clear", because dependence on fossil fuels exposes economies to shocks. The group is urging developed countries to take the lead in the global transition away from fossil fuels.
The EU will present a new strategy and targets for electrification before the summer. The bloc remains behind China and the US on that front, EU energy commissioner Dan Jorgensen said last week. Higher fossil fuel costs are "the brutal reality of fossil fuel dependency and it is a reality Europe cannot afford to keep accepting".
The war added more than €20bn ($23.5bn) to Europe's fossil fuel import costs, "with not a single extra molecule of energy to show for it", he said.
The Petersberg Climate Dialogue aims to bring together countries to prepare negotiations at UN Cop summits. The meeting comes a week before around 50 countries are due to gather for the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands. Fossil fuel producers Canada, the UK, Norway, Angola, Mexico, Brazil, Senegal and Australia will take part in the talks.
