With global temperatures continuing to rise at an unprecedented pace, President Irfaan Ali on Tuesday told a United Nations climate summit that Guyana intends to reduce its carbon emissions by 70 per cent over the next nine years.
“My country, Guyana, is already playing its part in addressing climate change and will continue to do so. We will maintain our forests, which is almost the size of England and Scot-land combined, storing 20 gigatonnes of carbon as a global asset. We will work with local communities on conserving, protecting and sustainably managing our forests, biodiversity and freshwater supplies. We will decouple economic growth and emissions through a progressively cleaner energy mix with the aim of reducing our carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2030,” Ali said during his national address on the second day of the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
The two-week summit is being hosted with the intention of seeing countries recommitting to actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in keeping with the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.
