(Paris) The joint China-United States declaration on the climate is “a significant moment before COP28”, welcomed the president of the latter on Wednesday, with experts regretting the lack of concrete progress.
“The consensus reached between the United States and China represents a significant moment before COP28,” commented Sultan Al Jaber, President of the 28e United Nations climate conference (November 30 – December 12) in Dubai.
“This sends a clear signal that despite global challenges, the COP28 call for climate action unites parties and raises ambitions,” he commented in a statement.
China and the United States pledged Wednesday to work more closely to combat global warming, stressing that the climate crisis is “one of the greatest challenges of our time.”
The announcement comes a few hours before the meeting, the first in a year, between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit organized in San Francisco.
“This is good news, it will help COP28” and “this prepares the ground for the conference in the Emirates,” greets Li Shuo, a former Greenpeace employee who joined the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“That said, it should also be noted that this declaration does not bring any major progress in terms of the commitment of the two countries” and “there will remain a significant number of areas of contention,” he underlines.
David Waskow, of the American think tank World Resources Institute (WRI), said it was “disappointing to see that the two countries are saying nothing about the need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels during this decade, which will be a central subject of COP28.”
“The most striking part of the joint declaration is the commitment of the two countries to include all greenhouse gases, including methane, in their next climate plans,” he notes, however.
This is “a major step forward because China is the world’s largest emitter of methane,” underlines the expert.
Methane is the second greenhouse gas of anthropogenic origin (linked to human activity) after carbon dioxide (CO2). But its warming effect is 28 times greater than that of CO2 over a 100 year horizon.