President Peter Mutharika has left Malawi this morning for Spain where he will attend the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference.
Mutharika has left the country through Kamuzu International Airport in Lilongwe.
The conference, known as COP25, gets underway in the Spanish capital, Madrid, on 2 December. The Climate Conference will be held in Madrid after the meeting was moved from Chile due to unrest there.
COP25, is the actual Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, which is tasked with making sure that the Convention, (and now the 2015 Paris Agreement, which strengthens the Convention), are being implemented.
It comes months after the Climate Action Summit in September which was an initiative of the UN Secretary-General to focus the attention of the international community on the climate emergency and to accelerate actions to reverse climate change.
Mutharika also attended the Climate Action Summit where he called for greater investment in climate action by development partners
The Climate Action Summit served as a springboard ahead of crucial 2020 deadlines established by the Paris Agreement, focusing global attention on the climate emergency and the urgent need to significantly scale up action.
During the summit, more than seventy countries committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, though major emitters have not yet done so. More than 100 cities did the same, including several of the world’s largest.
COP25 is the final COP before the defining year of 2020, when many nations must submit new climate action plans.
The United Nations has three climate goals: reducing emissions 45 per cent by 2030; achieving climate neutrality by 2050 (which means a net zero carbon footprint), and stabilizing global temperature rise at 1.5°C by the end of the century.
