Today marks the first day of United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP25, taking place in Madrid until 13 December. It is also one of the first activities for Josep Borrell in his role as EU High Representative.
“The EU is taking responsibility to tackle climate change but to have a global impact, we need collective action. I want to make climate action a key priority in our cooperation with partner countries. We want to work with everybody – from the biggest emmitters, which need to set a high level of ambition for themselves and deliver on it, to the potential emitters, who we will support in their efforts to ensure a sustainable economic transition. We will use all the means at our disposal – trade technical assistance, capacity building and development cooperation or even crisis management. This is the spirit of our geopolitical commission”, the EU High Representative stated in the context of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 25)(link is external).
The EU’s priorities for COP 25 include:
- completing the implementation guidelines for the voluntary cooperation mechanism of the Paris Agreement(link is external)
- completing the second review of the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage(link is external)
- completing the review of the Lima work programme on gender(link is external), and
- advancing technical work on the arrangements under the Enhanced Transparency Framework(link is external).
Reference to the upcoming European Green Deal is also made at the COP 25, whereby the European Climate Law will, for the first time, set in law the objective to make the EU climate-neutral by 2050. This means emitting less carbon dioxide and removing from the atmosphere the carbon dioxide emitted.
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COP 25 is taking place between 2-13 December in Madrid, under the Presidency of the Government of Chile. The conference aims to take the next crucial steps in the UN climate change process. Following agreement on the implementation guidelines of the Paris Agreement at COP 24 in Poland last year, a key objective is to complete several matters with respect to the full operationalization of the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
The conference furthermore serves to build ambition ahead of 2020, the year in which countries have committed to submit new and updated national climate action plans. Crucial climate action work will be taken forward in areas including finance, the transparency of climate action, forests and agriculture, technology, capacity building, loss and damage, indigenous peoples, cities, oceans and gender.
European Union
