The UN’s climate change champion for Cop27 Egypt, Mahmoud Mohieldin has said financing clean energy projects is critical and bringing together investors and communities across the same table is crucial.
Mohieldin, who doubles as the executive director at the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Special Envoy on financing the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, has said that he is looking forward to working with the UAE in the months leading up to Cop28.
Mohieldin, who was speaking at the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week on Tuesday, said that climate change discussions cannot be ‘elitist’, or held in a vacuum and that it is important to include people who are affected but never part of the dialogue.
“There are many good solutions in farming, for instance, that can improve productivity or knowledge sharing about best crops or crop insurance,” he said. “All these new solutions are about people but we need to put them in simple language, not to get people frightened. It’s not an elitist topic and I think hosting the Cop in Egypt and here in the UAE, gets in closer to common people from the developing economies.”
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Drawing in civil society, non-government institutions, universities and the private sector will be an essential part of the preparations before the next Cop in November and Mohieldin said that he has already met senior officials in the UAE team, including his counterpart, Razan Al Mubarak, the UN climate change high-level champion for the UAE Cop28 and discussed this and other priorities.
“This was the subject that took a lot of time between me and Razan Al Mubarak, the new champion from the UAE,” he said, adding that he also spoke of the need to convey to the wider public that “the cost of doing nothing is even more”.
According to him, the price of handling the damage caused by climate change would be far higher than investing in solutions.
Story was adapted from the National News.
