“Unfortunately, we are having wars, we’re having very serious things happening, but in spite of that, climate change is progressing, and climate change is a bigger and bigger threat,” he said.<\/p>\n
A transition away from fossil fuels<\/p>\n
That threat has many different faces. Already this year heatwaves<\/a>, intensified by climate change, have led to more than a thousand deaths in Europe, fueled wildfires<\/a> in the US, Canada, Turkey and South Korea and worsened flooding<\/a>\u00a0in Argentina, parts of Africa, and most recently in Texas.<\/p>\n There is pressure is on the Brazilian presidency under Correa do Lago to drive significant progress in this year’s summit \u2014 which comes a decade after the inception of the Paris Agreement.<\/p>\n Seen at the time as a big step towards tackling the climate crisis, the accord obliges governments to take action on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the planet to heat up.\u00a0<\/p>\n Brazil’s own policies in the spotlight<\/p>\n But with months to go until the summit kicks off in the Brazilian city of Belem, the country itself has come under scrutiny. It is selling off oil exploration rights \u2014 including at 19 sites around the mouth of the Amazon River.\u00a0Critics say this raises\u00a0questions around Brazil’s own commitment<\/a> to transitioning away from fossil fuels.<\/p>\n But Correa do Lago is pragmatic on the issue, saying that it is up to each country to determine its\u00a0path away from coal, oil and gas.<\/p>\n “Brazil is quite convinced that we can use some of the wealth that the oil brings to us to accelerate the transition,” he said. “We don’t have the perfect answer, but we have a very fair debate in the country about what we do with the oil that we may have.”<\/p>\n US withdrawal from climate negotiations<\/p>\n That thinking, however, is not in line with a roadmap<\/a> published by the autonomous intergovernmental International Energy Agency. Back in 2021, the IEA said that there could be no\u00a0new commitments for oil and gas fields if the world was stay below the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold agreed at the 2015 Paris talks.\u00a0<\/p>\nResidents transport drinking water along the dry Madeira River, a tributary of the Amazon, amid drought in Brazil.Image: Edmar Barros\/AP\/picture alliance<\/p>\n