WMO press conference Greenhouse Gas Bulletin 23 November 2020

[Other language spoken]

Good morning, everybody.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

The World Meteorological Organisation is releasing its annual greenhouse gas bulletin.

You can see it here.

This report, this reports on atmospheric concentrations of the main greenhouse gases.

It's a publication we release every year to inform decision makers about about climate change drivers.

So without further ado, I will pass the floor to the World Meteorological Organisation Secretary General Professor Petri Tallas.

On the line.

I'm also joined by Doctor Oksana Tarasova, who is the senior scientist who compiles this this bulletin.

And we are also joined by WM OS, Chief Scientist, your glutabeha, who can answer questions if need be.

At the end, you've received everything under embargo.

The press release is available in in all languages, and we can take questions at the end in English and in Russian.

So thank you very much.

Professor Tallis, over to you.

[Other language spoken]

I think Professor Tallis, you need to unmute yourself.

He's unmuted, but it seems that the mic his mic is not.

[Other language spoken]

So once you were doing this, unmuting you, it was changing the settings here for some reason, I don't know why.

Okay, anyhow, welcome to this event and and we are sorry that we can not organise this.

The physical form must be have usually done.

So this report has classically been published just before the COP meeting.

And as you all know, the COP meeting will take place next year in, in Glasgow.

And, and this year we will, we, we haven't going to have, have one.

And we will next week publish another report concerning the status of climate and, and, and we will tell you more about some, some physical parameters, what we have observed in climate and disasters and, and their impacts.

But today we will concentrate on the, on the concentrations of main greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

And, and, and this is some sort of thermometer, what's happening in climate in real terms, we have emissions and, and, and what finally matters is, is how much, for example, carbon dioxide concentrations are in the atmosphere.

That's, that's very much driving the, driving the climate forcing.

And that's, that's a factor that is warming the planet and, and it's also changing predation patterns and, and so forth.

So I will, I will show you some slides and, and thereafter we can, we can discuss the issues further.

Can I have the first part, please?

So this balloting that you can see here, that's that that's released today and you can find it from our website.

And we have few physical copies available as well.

And, and then and the next, next one please.

And this is demonstrating that we have a global network of of stations.

We have a little bit more than 100 stations that are reporting and, and we have also some measurements from vessels from the Pacific, Pacific area.

And, and, and we have, we have, we're very carefully running and calibration and system that we can make sure that the measurements that we are carrying out are globally the same carbon dioxide and all of these gases that we are talking of, they are they have very long lifetimes and the atmosphere is mixing them so that the concentrations are more of the same globally, but the annual variations are different because we have different sinks and, and different energy production systems worldwide.

[Other language spoken]

And here we have those three that are that I'm talking about.

And, and, and in in carbon dioxide, we exceeded the critical 400 PPM level a few years ago.

And, and, and this concentration is still rising.

This COVID has has led to a small drop in the emission emission growth.

But since the lifetime of carbon dioxide so long, we still measure, measure the continued growth.

And last year by the end of last year we exceeded the 410 PPM of carbon dioxide, we exceeded 1877 methane and 332PB MPPB in nitrous oxide.

And here you can see what has happened since, since the pre industrial times that we have enhanced the carbon dioxide concentration by about 150%, methane by more than 250% and and that was oxide to more than hundred 100%.

And, and, and, and we have seen also this year to year growth which which is not going in the right direction when we think of the of the of the of the impact of climate change.

[Other language spoken]

Here you can see the curves from from from the mid 80s and, and, and, and, and this growth is very steady and, and there have been variations in the growth rate.

But you can see also that this growth rate that you can see on the right hand side has has a, has a, has a trend.

So the growth rate has been fairly negative.

So that we have seen an increase also in that that respect.

[Other language spoken]

This growth has has continued as we have seen during the past last 15 years.

There was a plateau some 15 years ago, but but this growth seems to be continuing and, and, and the growth rate is not as impressive as as was the case in, in carbon dioxide and, and, and methane is very much coming from wetlands.

And, and we have also also food related emissions.

It's cattle specific cows which are producing methane and also also rice paddies are causing causing some of these problems.

[Other language spoken]

And then the third one is nitrous oxide, which is very, very much coming from from, from farm, farm lands, for example.

And there we have also seen a very steady, steady growth.

Next please and here you can see what is the relative importance of those gases.

Carbon dioxide contributes 2/3 of the warming methane about 1/6 of the warming nitrous oxide 7% and and then we have couple of also depleting gases.

It's all together contribute about seven 7% and you can see that the relative importance of, of carbon dioxide has has been growing and, and that's the main, main problem.

If you want to solve this climate change problem, it would especially tackle carbon dioxide and use of fossil energy, coal, oil and gas.

[Other language spoken]

So that's all from my my side.

And as Claire said, we're happy to answer your questions and a couple of colleagues here, we can also contribute.

[Other language spoken]

Professor Tallis, Dr Tara Silva, you've been compiling the bulletin now for quite a few years.

Perhaps if you could just give a few remarks just to, you know, summarise where we are.

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present the bulletin.

So this is a bulletin just one or two or echo what Secretary General said that we are reaching new record levels of all greenhouse gases and that is extremely important are in if we consider how the greenhouse gases should actually change in the atmosphere in response to the of promises made by the countries and commitments made by the countries.

We've seen one of the highest growth rates in our carbon dioxide.

It's higher than 10 year average on to put it on the perspective or so that you understand the increase of the year CU2 in the atmosphere.

If we look at the changes in the global average levels, we saw that the levels 1st 400 PMPPM in 2019, we passed 400 PPM in 2015, which makes 10 PPM within four years.

This is comparable with the level of CO2 changes which happens when the atmosphere passed through into glacial to glacial period.

And those changes in the past history happened, they're called abrupt changes.

They happen between 100 and 200 years.

And now we've done it in four years.

The rate of increase is dramatic and we have to address the problem.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much.

I think if we would like to go to questions, questions now and you can obviously ask, ask whatever you want.

So Lisa shrine of Voice of America as to hand out Lisa, you get the first question.

[Other language spoken]

Hi, Claire, hello everyone.

Yes, I, I have a have a few questions please, if you could sort of in words answer them.

You talk about the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

[Other language spoken]

Is it increasing faster than you expected?

And when is it likely that the world might reach a point of no return when climate change cannot be returned?

I mean, are you concerned that it is happening much faster than you had anticipated?

And then I would like to ask you about, you talk about COVID-19 lockdowns not having any impact on the decrease of carbon dioxide.

If you would elaborate upon that, on what you mean about that?

And then lastly, what actions must be taken in order to reverse what appears to be a very dramatic situation?

[Other language spoken]

So first of all, this is following the the fact that we have we are still enhancing our use of fossil energy and especially we have enhanced the use of oil and gas.

It's a it's a, it's A and, and there's been a slight Lotto in the use of of carbon carbon, which is slightly positive thing.

And at this point of return, we are not easily returning back to this pre industrial level because it's the the removal of carbon dioxide from atmosphere is very slow process and, and finally takes place through these sedimentation to oceans and that's very, very slow process.

So, so the issue now is that whether we could reach this Paris agreement that limits 1.5 to 2° and and and and and and, and, and actually it's negative trending climate will continue for the coming decades anyhow.

So that's that that that's a factor.

But if we are successful in climate mitigation, we could stop this negative trend in 2000 and 60s and, and, and, and we have now several countries and and groups of countries which have indicated they would like to commit to this arbitrary targets of 2050.

That's European Union Japan and South Korea and China indicated in September that they would their aim is to become carbon neutral by 2060.

And and and and also the Biden administration have syndicated that they would they would have such such a name and, and, and, and how to reach that we have we have to convert our energy system from coal, oil and gas fired ones to become more dependent on, on, on renewable NHC, solar, wind and hydropower.

And, and also there may be a need to build more nuclear power plants to, to, to comfort massive need of energy in, in China type of type of countries in transport systems, which is the second most important sector here.

You have have to convert our, our, our fleet on on the ground.

We have to use more electric vehicles.

We have to use more biofuels and, and there's also a potential for, for hydrogen used to use hydrogen as a fuel.

And, and, and then we have to favour much more public transportation and, and, and biking and, and walking the city, city type of areas.

And then we have also industrial processes where an emissions are produced.

And, and, and there again, we have to convert our systems to be carbon, carbon neutral.

And, and, and then we can slightly enhance the carbon sinks worldwide.

And we use the bio the, the biosphere to reduce the, the concentration from atmosphere.

But the, the potential of, of, of carbon sinks, that's somewhat limited.

So the, the key issue is to convert our NSC systems, our transport systems and some industrial systems to, to become carbon, carbon neutral.

And this point of return, we are not going to return back to this, this three industrial levels very soon.

It takes centuries, but but we can still aim at this 1.5° which would be the best choice for the welfare of of the planet and, and, and mankind and also economically that would be the best, best target.

So that's what this kind of apocalyptic use that that we would see the end of the world because of climate change.

They are not based on on moral calculations.

They are more, more this kind of risk analysis type of type of thinking.

And then this report was aiming at the, the talking about the emissions last year.

So we have this was the, this was this report was valid until the end of last year.

But this year we have seen drops of emissions by 4 to 7% because of the COVID lockdowns.

And but that's not going to change the big picture because the lifetime of carbon dioxide is so, so long.

That's all from my side.

Doctor Thomas, would you want to add anything to?

[Other language spoken]

I can actually clarify because there's are just a look at the at the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in very let's say or in comprehensive way.

So just to make an just to make for an easy comparison.

So the CO2 which we have now in the atmosphere is accumulated scenes 1750.

So it's every single beat which we put in the atmosphere since that time.

It actually forms the current concentration.

It's not what happened today or yesterday, It's the whole history of the human economic and human development which actually lead us to this global level of 410.

And the the easy comparison which all colleagues from the Global Carbon Project make is that if you imagine a big buff top with water level in it, then the water level in the buff top would be all the water which is accumulated if you open the tap.

And when we talk about the impact of COVID and Professor Tallis indicated that the impact of COVID on emissions is between 4:00 to 7%.

So despite the fact that it looked like that the world stands still, we get only the decrease 4 to 7% and emissions which we produce.

So our whole economy and our consumption partners actually wire us to the extremely **** emissions even if we all sit on lockdown and limit all mobility, because lockdown is only limit on the mobility and not on our consumption patterns.

So what it what it means in my comparison with the buff top is that you just slightly reduce the flow of water from the tap and the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere or the levels of water in the buff tub will increase.

Even if you put any non 0 emissions, even if you put one droplet, the level will of water will increase the same as with carbon dioxide.

That's why when when we discuss what should we do, we really need to tackle our CO2 as the main cause of climate change.

And of course there are other gases which allow us to see the results much faster.

For example, methane options has not been realised to the full extent and methane or while it's a long lived greenhouse gas, it's, it has a very limited time of our nine years in the atmosphere.

So we can actually are addressing the greenhouse gases in the whole package to get or to the targets which we would like to reach with the temperature.

[Other language spoken]

Next question is Christiana Irish from the German Press Agency.

Christiana, good morning everyone.

I'm also trying to get my head around looking into the future.

So did I understand correctly if CO2 emissions were dropping now, we would only see the effect in the 20 sixties?

That's what I understood.

Now, if we want to keep to 1.5 by the end of the century, another 80 years.

How much and at what point in time would the emissions, the CO2 emissions have to drop?

[Other language spoken]

So if I if I start, So what?

What was shown by the IPCC report two years ago of this 1.5°?

We should, if you would like to reach carbon neutrality or this 1.5° target and we should become carbon neutral by 2050.

And, and as I said, good news is that we have now growing amount of countries and and groups of countries who have who have committed to that.

So far, we have 50% of the global emissions which are coming from, from China, European Union and Japan and South Korea, and also 50% of the global CDP behind this.

And if, if USA with the Biden administration will have the same target, then that that would mean that we would have maturity of our, our emissions and, and also maturity of the global economy behind such a target.

But, and, and, and we should bend this emission growth curve in the coming five years.

And and then we should start seeing drops of the emissions of the order of 6% per year until to the 2050 that to to reach that target.

And if you would like to reach the upper limit of Paris agreement that we have about 20 more than 20 years time to bend this emission growth curve to become a decrease and and then it will become carbon neutral by 20 seventies.

So that's the that's the that's the target.

And and, and as I said, we have economic means and, and, and fire and, and technical means to reach, reach that.

And, and it was already shown long time ago by for example, Stern report that the, that the, that the finance resources for needed for this conversion, they are fairly, fairly small.

We are talking about altogether a few percent of the GDP in, in, in total until, until the end of this century.

So basically we could afford this, this change and, and this wouldn't change the, our, our normal life too much.

We have seen dramatic changes because of the of the COVID and, and, and this is, this is fairly marginal of what is needed to be successful in climate, climate mitigation.

Does that answer your question?

[Other language spoken]

All right.

[Other language spoken]

Good morning, everyone.

[Other language spoken]

The rise isn't as dramatic as last year.

What would you attribute that to?

Is that good news?

Are there fewer leaks from fossil fuels potentially?

And then if I could ask just a broader question, if possible, how much of A game changer will it be having Biden in the White House versus Trump, do you think?

[Other language spoken]

I would answer the technical question that's that's OK for anything.

The the story of being is actually quite complicated because this is this is the gas which is emitted by the natural sources and by anthropogenic sources.

The reason into any of variability which is controlled by the metrological condition because our if we look at the even the natural forces which constitute like 40% of methane emissions in the atmosphere and even in anthropogenic sources which also are related for example with agriculture are those sources are sensitive to climate.

So if you have an increase in temperature, then the biogenic methane which is produced by those sources would proportionally increase.

Or if you have a let's say lower temperature or lower precipitation, then those changes would would decrease.

So the part in which we observe are is is actually very difficult to attribute to one particular source.

What we know for sure is that the recent increase which started our from 2007 is related to the biogenic sources and those biogenic sources can be of natural or or region or can be of the tropogenic region like the the rice cities agriculture or the our Catholic agriculture which is also related to methane emissions.

What we also can see as that there is are these increases which we see they are happening in the tropical and N latitude are mid latitude, mid subtropical and mid latitudes which actually is the areas where you do have quite a lot of overlap between the natural and anthropogenic sources, so difficult to actually use.

While we have a capabilities now, as we indicated on the balloting, there are emerging capabilities that allow us to observe hotspots, for example, from satellites.

And one meteorological organisation is also developing the global system which is called Integrated Global Greenhouse Cuts Information System, which would use atmospheric observation to exactly tackle the the hotspots and help the policy makers to use objective information to support their actions.

[Other language spoken]

And the political question for Professor Tanis on the Biden administration coming coming in.

[Other language spoken]

So actually the have the public image of USA is worse than and the reality.

So USA has already fulfilled half of its Paris pledges and, and, and, and for example, there has been a conversion of the, of the NSA systems in many cases from first to call to gas and, and, and, and there's also there has been quite nice investments in, in solar and wind, NHC and, and many U.S.

states have fairly ambitious climate targets.

For example, California is sharing this 2050 carbon neutrality aim and, and also Florida is doing so.

So, so there's much more happening in USA and, and also also for example, Tesla car was a game changer in that respect.

So the situation is not very bad in USA and, but, but by then as at least in his campaign, he was indicating that he would invest both in carbon friendly technologies.

There would be a fairly, fairly big package for that.

And, and we are talking about the couple of trillions and, and then he has indicated that he would like to have the same aim as as as many others that would become carbon neutral by by 20/20/50.

And of course that will be good news for the globally and, and, and, and it might have a little bit the domino effect that it might motivate also some other countries to join, join this kind of movement.

Thank you, Paula to President of YES, yes, hello.

Thank you for taking my question.

It's actually for carbon and sorry chemical engineering use.

So I have a couple of questions.

First of all, I, I wanted to know what's the impact what you see is the main issues of the delay of the COP 26.

What are the impacts of those delay, that delay in the negotiations may have with the most, the greatest concerns that you have about that LAR.

And then you had Professor Tellison mentioned that one may have to build more nuclear plants to achieve these Glo goals of carbon neutrality.

Just wondering if there is a discussion amongst certain countries about, you know, either returning to nuclear or building those nuclear plants.

And then finally, I have a last more technical question.

Also on the location of your observations.

I noticed that some, quite a few of the observations were taken in the Eastern Pacific region and whilst there were not so many of those observations taken in the Western Pacific, and I was wondering whether that may have an impact on exactly the precision of the climate change in in especially South America and Latin America.

Professor Tellis, do you want to take the first question?

OK, so, so this COP 26 delay, so one year doesn't change the big, big picture.

And, and as I said, we have heard lots of positive news recently that the many key players have indicated that they would like to follow this, this Paris agreement lower, lower limit, the 1.5° path, which is, which is to me very good news.

And, and, and we have also growing amount of big companies and, and, and finance institutions who are, who are having this, who are supporting this, this aim.

And, and, and it's if, if Biden administration will join Paris agreement and, and they will have this ambitious climate programme, there's a good reason to expect some good outcomes of this COP 26 in Glasgow November next year.

So at least I'm personally optimistic.

The nuclear energy is, is is is is, of course, it's a, it's a challenging form of energy because we have nuclear waste and, and it's not, not an easy solution to, to, to this, this question.

But, but we have countries and groups of countries that may need massive amount of energy.

And, and for example, in China, where, where which is the largest user of coal-fired energy, that there may be a need for, for nuclear energy to be able to produce a massive amount of NHC.

China has actually invested a lot, actually the biggest amount the worldwide to renewable energy.

But, but the need of NHC has been, has been, is so massive that that that it's likely a nuclear NHC is needed.

And, and now there are also new ways of producing nuclear NHC.

We have these small, small, small units.

And, and that may be part of the part of the solution in, in, in Western countries, the standards for nuclear power plant construction, they are so **** that it's very expensive to build the nuclear power plants.

And, and, and that has practically stopped this, this production.

So the return of investment in investments for wind and solar and see they're much higher than than than in case of case of nuclear.

And that's that that may prohibit the massive build up of of, of those in, in our type of type of countries here in Europe.

And, and as I said, the, the, the lifetime of carbon dioxide is more than 100 years and the atmosphere is serving as a, as, as, as some sort of mixture of these gases.

So, so the concentrations of of of of, of, of these greenhouse gases that we may be talking about, they are so long that the basic concentrations are almost the same same worldwide.

There is this annual variability which may be a little bit different depending on the strength of the sinks and sources, but the basic concentrations are the, are the same.

Of course we would like to see more stations worldwide to be able to follow follow the carbon budget, the sinks sources more in detail.

But but even with this network, we can we can do fairly good job.

Perhaps oxen, I could say a few words about that as well.

[Other language spoken]

I can also comment only on the second question concerning the sources of power or as you know or this has been quite active discussion about all of geoengineering which can be potentially used to help us our to produce carbon dioxide, our concentration in the atmosphere.

And one of the potential our proposals which is on the table and it's been discussed by IPCC as well as as well as included in the multiple climate scenarios including 1.5° scenario and two degrees scenario is the combination of the biomass brain biomass energy, whether carbon capture and storage those Becks technique are though those are not available at scale.

There are discussions are about the future availability of such techniques which would allow you to use the biomass as a few and then capture the carbon dioxide which is produced from the burning of these biomass.

And those techniques are actually are included in the majority of IPCC scenario which meet the our carbon.

The the Paris Agreement goal are concerning the location of the stations.

The triangular which is saw on the map, these are the flosks which are collected during the our ship cruises.

So these are not the permanent stations and that is the only regular profile over the ocean which we managed to collect.

There are other measurements which are done over the ocean from the ship of opportunities and we are working very closely with the other agencies of United Nations who are working on the collection of information over the oceans.

Those data are collected on, for example, included in the silicon database.

We can't use them for analysis of global average because those data are collected on on a non regular basis.

But as Professor Tallis explained, most of the gases have very long lifetime in the atmosphere, so they are very well mixed and they have quite small geographical gradients.

So with a number of stations which we have now, which are placed in the locations where you have for a very, very large footprint.

And this is like how far the station can see in its measurements.

So we get a a representative, our global network which helps us to understand the global and regional tendencies in levels of greenhouse gases.

Of course, if we wanted to go to the particular sources and in particular sinks in the particular region, we would need many more stations and that would help us to clarify on a national and sub national scale and this is what we do through our integrated global greenhouse gas information system.

They would help us to understand what are the national and sub national changes in the level of greenhouse gases and associated emissions.

[Other language spoken]

And the last question that I see is from Nina Larsen of AFP, the French news agency.

Thanks for your patience and Nina.

[Other language spoken]

Thanks for taking my question.

I had one question for Doctor Torres.

So you mentioned initially that the hike from 400 to 410 PPM's was abrupt since it happened in four years and not, if I understood correctly, hundreds of years, this would have been expected.

So to me, that sounds sort of like it would be some kind of tipping point.

But at the same time, it sounds like you're saying the situation can be turned around.

If you could just address that.

And then on the COVID measures, well, while they haven't had a huge impact on concentrations, you think that the measures that have been put in place the, the complete shutdowns that we've seen, could that have some impact on, are you hopeful that could have impact showing people that it's possible to take more dramatic measures in the face of crises like the climate crisis?

[Other language spoken]

Probably I would need to clarify a little bit.

So the the changes which I mentioned are so I don't know if you can see the graph.

So if you can see the plot here, so you can see that it's not an abrupt change.

This is this is the rate which we actually see in the last 10 years and or it was slightly less in your previous ten years.

But in general the increase which we've seen within the last 10 years and this year is quite consistent with increase of emissions in the atmosphere.

And the change of 10 PPM has happened are from 2015 to 2019.

This is 4 years.

The comparison which I try to make is put it into the historical perspective.

Like if we take the whole story of the data of CO2 which are available, we can make the measurements and direct measurements in the our bubbles which are kept in the ice or we call it Fern and we analyse those ferns for the levels of atmospheric CO2 and we can go are as far back as 800,000 years with their similar technique as we use now.

So if we put the current changes in the perspective of previous changes, what happened in historical time?

Have we ever seen any changes of this magnitude in the history of science?

Because you know that Earth went through the our glacial periods into glacial periods.

We were in, I don't know, very, very hot climates 3 to 5 million years back.

So did we ever see such dramatic changes?

So we increase CO2 in the atmosphere by 10 parts per million within four years.

If we put it in historic perspective, did we have these changes of these magnitude?

Did we ever see 10 PPM change in the previous history of the Earth?

And yes, we've seen such changes, but those changes happened and the whole climate changed from glacial to interglacial.

And that changed happened within 100 to 200 years.

So this is a transition from interglacial to glacial, 100 years to 100 years.

The increase in CO2 to PPM, we humans did it without anything, just with our emissions.

We've done it within four years.

It's just to put it in historical perspective.

And Professor Tallis, there was the second part of Nina's question.

Nina, can you just remind us what the second part of your question was?

[Other language spoken]

Yes, sorry, the.

Second part, it was just on the COVID measures, while they haven't impacted the concentrations in the atmosphere, if they may, if you think are hopeful that they may impact the attitudes towards taking dramatic measures to address the crisis?

[Other language spoken]

So, so from, from, so so can you hear me?

[Other language spoken]

So from, from, so as as I said, we have expect to see 4 to 7% drop in the emissions this year because of the of the COVID and, and, and there are many countries who have as part of their COVID recovery packets they have decided to invest in, in, in climate friendly technologies.

So that's for example, but this so European Union has the €750 billion recovery packets and and it's understood that large fraction of that money should be spent on a climate friendly trendy solutions.

Canada has the same same target and, and, and by the administration has indicated that they would invest the 222 trillion U.S.

dollars for for climate 20 technologies as part of their recovery package.

Of course, has to be applauded by the by the US Senate and Congress and, and we will see what is the final, final outcome.

And, and, and, and of course for the coming months, this COVID will be, will be dominating the scene and, and it will have an impact on, on economies for the coming years.

In developed world, it may be two to three years.

And, and in less developed countries even even more from our side, that's doubly more.

We are concerned of our less developed members because this may endanger their observing systems and and also their service early warning service capabilities.

And that's, that's, that's our concern.

But, but to summarise, as I said in my introduction, the means needed, the changes of our, our everyday life needed to, to be successful in climate mitigation.

They are really marginal as compared to the the offerings that we have made to keep this COVID under control.

[Other language spoken]

We just have one last question and we need to wrap up Zhang Zheng Hao and then that's the final question.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much for taking my question.

And I have a question for Doctor Tellers.

So yesterday the G20 Leaders Summit had held a side event on safeguarding planet.

Chinese President Xi Jinping pointed out his speech that the Earth is our common home.

We must work together to deal with challenges in the field of climate and environment and put forward through propositions.

So how would you evaluate China's contribution to energy saving and emission reduction?

And in your opinion, what actions must be taken to encourage countries to further support the the Paris Agreement?

[Other language spoken]

First of all, of course, China, it's great that the XI indicated in September that China aims at becoming carbon neutral by 2060.

And and then as I said, you have also invested a lot if you know and you have become leading exporter of solar decorative as, as, as an example.

So this is also a business, business opportunity.

But China as a country, you are also very sensitive to impacts of climate change.

You have low lying cities on your East Coast, which is where, where you have maturity of your economy at the moment.

And, and the sea level rise threatens cities like Shanghai and, and several, several others.

And, and also we know that the Himalayan glaciers are melting, which means that we have already started seeing less freshwater released to the main Asian rivers.

And, and, and this lack of freshwater, that's already a challenge and it's going to be more so in the coming, coming decades.

And, and these groundwater sources that you are using in China, they are also also getting more sparse.

So China has very also very good own reasons why why you should be active in climate mitigation.

And, and, and the other problem that you are you have been facing in China is, is air quality.

And, and you can, you can mitigate the, both the air quality challenge and the climate challenge by converting the NHC systems to be less based on, on, on fossil, fossil energy, especially coal and, and, and, and oil, which are, which are both alluding the, the air and, and they're causing these greenhouse gas emissions.

And, and, and, and as I said in my introduction, it's very good news that there's so many countries have already been indicating that they would like to commit to the Paris 1.5° target.

And, and, and, and that's, that's great news.

And the fact that China decided to join, join such, such a club of countries, I think that's, that's excellent.

And hopefully there will be many more countries who are who are following the same same path.

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And I think that we'll, we'll, we'll wrap up.

Thank you very much to all the journalists for attending.

Special thanks to UN Television for hosting us live.

And obviously thank you to Professor Thomas and Doctor Tara Silver.

So thank you very much indeed.

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