Kofi Annan’s Legacy Lives-on at the Latin American & Caribbean Climate Week

21 August 2018

UN Climate Press Release

UN Climate Change News, 21 August 2018 – Today, the Latin American & Caribbean Climate Week got underway with an opening ceremony that attracted a notable cast of local leaders, including Eneida De Leon, Minister of Housing, Land Planning and Environment of Uruguay, who welcomed attending delegates in Montevideo.

The event is being orchestrated by the members of the Nairobi Framework Partnership, which was founded by Kofi Annan in 2006, as a means of bolstering the interlinkages between governments, the private sector, and the developing world. Following news of the former Secretary-General’s passing last weekend, it’s clear that the world needs to enhance this kind of multilateral collaboration if it is to make the Paris Agreement a reality.

The Latin American & Caribbean Climate Week – and indeed all regional Climate Weeks hosted throughout the globe annually – are therefore a tangible and necessary way of honoring Kofi Annan’s instinct to bring everyone on board to solve the world’s great problems which, in this instance, is climate change.

Representing the Nairobi Framework Partnership, Patricia Espinosa, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, said: “Right now, we need ideas, best practices and lessons learned from every segment of society, whether businesses, investors, regional and local leadership, and everyday people. It’s what I call “inclusive multilateralism and it means having more voices at the table leading to more climate change solutions.”

On a continent that is flanked on each side by two great oceans – the Atlantic and the Pacific – the region is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events, tropical storms and hurricanes, such as those that recently hit the Caribbean and Meso America, with devastating consequences.

Eneida De Leon, Minister of Housing, Land Planning and Environment of Uruguay said: “For Uruguay, as well as for the entire region of Latin America and the Caribbean, the response to climate change is a priority for our public policies. In this regard, we welcome the celebration of this event, in which we hope to exchange and work to strengthen the implementation of the Paris Agreement in our region.”

Latin American and Caribbean nations are not newcomers to the stage of climate action; Costa Rica continues its race towards carbon neutrality; Chile’s landmark carbon tax penalizes less efficient vehicles based on urban performance; meanwhile, Mexico’s General Law on Climate Change is a milestone in regulatory integration. All this represents just a slice of the ambition, which is now a hallmark of the region, and which is now being showcased at the 3-day Climate Week, concluding on Thursday afternoon.

Latin America and Caribbean Climate Week 2018, runs to 23 August in Montevideo, Uruguay and was preceded by the Asia Pacific Climate Week from 10-13 July, Singapore.

Both events build momentum ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit in California and New York Climate Week as a means of demonstrating that there is genuine international support for stepping-up local, national, regional and international climate action on the part of all stakeholders.

For media enquiries relating to the regional Climate Weeks, please contact:

Matthew Phillips: mphillips(at)unfccc.int

About the UNFCCC

With 197 Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement. The main aim of the Paris Agreement is to keep a global average temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The UNFCCC is also the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The ultimate objective of all agreements under the UNFCCC is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system, in a time frame which allows ecosystems to adapt naturally and enables sustainable development.