CAIRO: “The way is long” to a climate change agreement, stated Environmental Minister Khaled Fahmy at a Climate Finance Workshop hosted by the European Union in Cairo Tuesday morning.
Minister Fahmy will travel to Paris in early November, as a precursor to the Cop21 Paris climate meetings, which will kick off Dec. 7, with an aim to draft a strategy to effectively limit the global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius.
“The most vulnerable countries, we produce 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and half of us live on less than $1 a day. Our lives depend on nature,” said Fahmy, adding that “We are not going to Paris to re-write the convention,” but that they would be pressing for safeguards to ensure that the global polluters are the ones to foot the costs of environmental protection.
Environmental Minister Khaled Fahmy speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Climate Finance Workshop
“Morocco is going to be important. Whatever we agree on in Paris we will have to detail and design the implementation mechanism, which is the hard job,” Fahmy told The Cairo Post on the sidelines of the workshop, referring to the next scheduled conference in Marrakesh in November 2016.
Fahmy cautioned that the overall costs of a climate change strategy have to have transparency of funding.
“[There is] no room for innovative accounting techniques, like the one now where this is a part of overall economic development aid,” he said.
“Egypt will be among the countries most hit by climate change,” said German ambassador to Cairo Julius Georg Luy, at the workshop.
James Moran the European Union Ambassador to Cairo, stressed that the inclement weather recently witnessed in Alexandria is an example of changes that can be caused by a rise in global temperatures, adding that “Egypt has a crucial role to play” as a regional power.