By Rachel Kyte, Vice-President Climate Change Group, World Bank, originally posted at World Bank
Rachel Kyte is a plenary speaker at the Global Landscapes Forum 6-7 December in Lima (High-level opening plenary: Negotiating landscapes for multiple benefits). In her blog she refers to it as Landscapes Day.
Over the next few months, governments worldwide will be preparing their national contributions to our collective need to combat climate change. These plans will form the foundation of a new international climate agreement to be agreed in Paris in one year’s time. Collective ambition matters now more than ever. We all have a responsibility to make the choices that will lower the risks created by decades of greenhouse gas emissions and usher in an era of job-rich, more-inclusive, cleaner economic development.
Scientists have provided us with a remarkable consensus. We believe that with this evidence, we have the strong foundation for action. That’s good news, because climate action has to scale up now.
This week and next at the UN climate negotiations in Lima (COP20), there is a sense that gridlock may be easing. The U.S. and China – the world’s two largest emitters – set a strong pace last month when Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping stood together and jointly announced their top-line commitments for cutting emissions. Their pledges, along with commitments from the European Union and donor support for the Green Climate Fund, auger well for the Lima talks. But this was always billed as the finance COP, and how we finance the transition to deep decarbonization and lasting resilience requires a coming together that has eluded us to date….
We will agree that the evidence is clear that we need to mainstream resilience into development and that we need an injection of new development finance to meet the clear needs of the most vulnerable to climate change.
Landscapes Day at the COP will take place Dec. 6-7. We’re delighted that the broader land-use communities are coming together. If the goal is clearly to decarbonize by 2100, then the way we manage landscapes and the value we place on nature and ecosystems will need to shift and soar to the top of the agenda.
We believe government policies, planning, and business practices can help rein in deforestation and improve land management practices. At the World Bank Group, we are helping countries to change from business-as-usual land use to climate-smart development that integrates forestry and agriculture. Results-based payments that provide additional value to countries that successfully reduce deforestation and forest degradation offer promising lessons. The programs that support working in these areas need to be more streamlined and better coordinated if we are to move to scale. We are excited by the number of countries that are poised to move forward.
Read full blog here
