Forty-five nations will pledge to strengthen the protection of nature and reform farming to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Mr. Boris Johnson, the British hosts of the COP26 United Nations climate summit announced.
An official statement made in Glasgow stated that it is critical to combat global warming caused by farming, deforestation, and other land-use changes which account for about a quarter of humanity’s planet-heating emissions, with a rising world population.
COP26 is the first major test of the 2015 Paris Agreement. When countries negotiated this, they agreed to limit the rise in global average temperature to well below 2° Celsius and pursue efforts to not exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Average surface temperatures are already up about 1.2°C.
Backers include major economies led by the United States, Japan and Germany as well as emerging countries like India, Indonesia, Morocco, Vietnam, the Philippines, Gabon, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uruguay.
The total amount of funding was not mentioned in the statement, but it noted that the initiatives would include “leveraging over $4 billion in new public sector investment into agricultural innovation, including the development of climate-resilient crops and regenerative solutions to improve soil health.”
Among the initiatives, Britain announced a $675 million boost to safeguard more than 5 million hectares of tropical rainforests, the equivalent of more than 3.5 million football pitches, and to generate thousands of green jobs across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
In addition, the COP26 statement stated that more than ten new countries have signed up to a target of safeguarding at least 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030, which are suffering from overfishing and warming waters. They are India, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jamaica, St Lucia, Sri Lanka, Qatar, Samoa, Tonga, Gambia and Georgia.
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