Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenko, on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, criticised the leaders of rich countries for skipping the climate talks under way in Azerbaijan’s capital and said the climate crisis is being exacerbated by conflicts around the world.
“The people who are responsible for this are absent,” admonished the strongman leader and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin in a speech on the second day of the UN climate talks in Baku.
Lukashenko singled out French President Emmanuel Macron, noting that the landmark agreement to pursue efforts to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 Celsius was forged in Paris in 20015.
Macron is just one of several big names missing from the two-week summit in Baku. Others include US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Brazilian President Lula da Silva.
Lukashenko said his own country had nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to global warming and that Belarus was meeting all of its climate obligations.
“We have a war in the Middle East, a war in Ukraine, a war in the south of Yemen – more than 50 conflicts in the world that have a severe impact on the climate,” Lukashenko continued in his speech to the plenary in Baku.
Belarus was a partial staging ground for Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In a related development, Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said that the global community must become more ambitious in reaching its climate targets, pointing to the recent floods in his country that left at least 220 people dead.
Sánchez, speaking at the UN Climate Change Conference in Baku, called the warming planet an “existential threat” to humanity.
He said all countries are contending with the impacts, from more violent storms to more intense wildfires.
But many governments and businesses still continue to invest in climate-damaging energy sources such as oil and gas, Sánchez said, adding that this was leading to a global “catastrophe.”
The prime minister said “drastic measures” to protect the climate and the targeted rebuilding of cities to withstand global warming is needed.
