The COP24 climate summit in Poland kicked off on December 2. Representatives from nearly 200 countries around the world arrived to discuss the environment and agree on ways to implement pledges made in Paris three years ago.
In a rare intervention, presidents of previous UN climate summits issued a joint statement as the talks got underway in the Polish mining city of Katowice, calling on states to take “decisive action… to tackle these urgent threats”.
“The impacts of climate change are increasingly hard to ignore,” said the statement, a copy of which was obtained by the Agence France-Presse (AFP). “We require deep transformations of our economies and societies.”
According to AFP, experts have warned that even solid progress in Katowice on the Paris goals may not be enough to prevent runaway global warming, as a series of major climate reports have outlined.
