– President of the African Union (AU) demands climate responsibility from rich countries
«Developed countries are responsible for climate change,» said Elba Rosa Pérez Montoya, Cuban Minister of Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA) in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, where the XXVII United Nations Conference on Climate Change is taking place. Climate (COP 27).
«For this reason, developed nations must assume their commitments to provide means of implementation to the developing world, including financing, technologies and contribution to capacity building,» said Pérez Montoya after his arrival in that Afro-Asian country, according to the official site. of the CITMA.
The minister, who heads the Cuban delegation to COP 27, scheduled for the 6th to the 18th of this month in that Egyptian spa city, between the desert of the Sinai Peninsula and the Red Sea, said that the event has the peculiarity of coinciding with a global multisectoral crisis: environmental, economic, with marked inflation, health, energy and military, which should affect its results.
For his part, the head of state of Senegal and current president of the African Union, Macky Sall, agreed that those who pollute the most should pay more to get our planet out of the climate crisis.
The so-called black continent contributes less than four percent of greenhouse gases on a global scale, the dignitary recalled when making one of the words at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( COP27).
However, Africa is a driving force for low-carbon development, the AU leader contrasted.
In Sall’s words, COP27 is an opportunity for both industrialized nations and developing countries to «make history» or «be victims of history», in the face of worsening extreme climate variations and their growing harmful effects.
«Those who pollute the most,» «should pay more to get our planet out of this climate crisis,» he remarked.
On the other hand, the Cuban minister affirmed that we will always be aligning our positions with the developing island countries and in general, with the largest group of developing countries, articulated by the G-77 and China, and South-South cooperation will continue to be a tool of Cuban solidarity in these processes, he argued.
Cuba will support the efforts of developing countries to ensure the financial mechanisms required to deal with the losses and damages caused by climate change and better focus the debates on the definition of a new financial goal, based on the needs of the underdeveloped, she said.
"An Island on a Continent" 