HANGZHOU: Major countries should pay more attention to climate change, abide by the Paris Agreement and make concrete contributions to the treaty, according to Nobel laureate Daniel Kammen.
The energy expert on Sunday gave an exclusive interview to Xinhua during the World Young Scientists Summit (WYSS) 2020 in the city of Wenzhou, east China’s Zhejiang Province.
“China’s plan to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and to become carbon neutral by 2060 are huge steps forward,” he said, adding he believes China has the capability to achieve the goals ahead of the set time frame.
China has fulfilled its obligations under climate change, biodiversity, and other environment-related treaties, and reached its 2020 targets on climate change and establishing nature reserves ahead of schedule.
Kammen spoke highly of the country’s contribution to environmental issues. “China has been a very important leader in the manufacture and sale of solar, wind, and energy storage technologies, which helped bring down the global price of these green energy technologies,” he said. “This, in turn, made these technologies much more globally competitive.”
China is an active participant in global environmental governance and will host the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2021 in the southwestern city of Kunming. The meeting will discuss a new strategy on global biodiversity governance.
Kammen said China still faces serious challenges in biodiversity conservation. “This needs to be an area where all major economies — China, Japan, the USA, and the EU — need to move to the sustainable management of ocean resources and rebuilding healthy marine ecosystems,” he said.–Agencies
