New York City, 25 September 2024
“Check against delivery”
Ladies and gentlemen,
I’m honoured to deliver this statement on behalf of the European Union and its 27 Member States.
Last year shattered climate records with temperatures as high as 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, it looks as if 2024 is set to do the same again.
With this ever-hotter climate and its ever more extreme impacts, we are moving into unknown territory.
And it is against this backdrop that today’s High-Level Meeting and the two-year process it launches are both timely and of extreme important.
Let me turn briefly to two of the crucial elements on which our common efforts to address the effects of climate change and sea-level rise in particular, should focus: mitigation and building climate resilience through adaptation.
First on mitigation. There is no time to bury our heads in the sand a moment longer. It’s essential that we keep working towards net-zero in 2050. That means we must cut emissions. We have no alternative than to do that together, and we have to make it our top priority.
For the European Union, it means that we have to and will upload our commitment to reach climate neutrality by 2050. This objective is part of our Climate Law, and we are well on the way to implementing the policies needed to achieve that transition in a way that is both fair and just and enables clean economic growth.
It is important to recall the advisory opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) on a Request submitted to it by the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law. ITLOS found that Parties to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea do have an obligation of due diligence to take all the necessary measures to prevent, reduce and control marine pollution from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore, it is our collective duty to act now to address the effects of climate change.
And that brings me to climate resilience. Because curbing emissions won’t be enough. We must accept that climate risks are growing and taking action to adapt and become more resilient to them is necessary in our heating climate.
Like all other regions of the world, Europe is facing major climate hazards, ranging from both extreme weather events like heatwaves, storms, and extreme precipitation – as witnessed in Central Europe, only a few days ago – where we unfortunately lost so many lives – and longer-term phenomena such as sea-level rise that we see in our coastal areas.
Rising sea levels are exacerbating floods in Europe. Already, there are over 100,000 European citizens who are exposed to coastal flooding every year.
I know this myself, coming from a country which lies, for the better part, below sea level. I understand the ever-higher stakes for vulnerable countries and low-lying island states around the world whose communities are seeing their lands wash away. The EU is with you in this struggle. We will continue to fight for greater ambition on mitigation, and to support with adaptation measures and loss and damage.
To overcome these challenges, it is vitally important that we act now and adapt to inevitable impacts of climate change. To be more specific, coastal protection needs to consider the full spectrum of adaptation solutions. We must work from forecasting and early-warning systems to flood proofing infrastructure, and the capacity to retreat from high-risk areas, where possible. In most cases, we need a combination of all.
Let me mention some good examples from our region.
Source – EU Commission