US climate envoy John Kerry confirmed to CNN that formal climate talks with China were restarted at the UN’s COP27 summit in Egypt, lifting a months-long freeze on talks.
The meeting is an early sign of concrete results from a meeting between US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Bali earlier this week.
Asked to confirm whether formal talks between the US and China had resumed, Kerry said: “Yes, we are in talks.”
Nations are the world’s two biggest polluters and their cooperation is crucial if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change. When Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua announced that their countries would work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year, it was rare good news in the once very bleak climate space.
But cooperation ended abruptly in August, when China suspended talks in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
In talks with Xi at the G20 summit in Bali on Monday, Biden highlighted the importance of the world’s two biggest emitters continuing to work on climate and reducing emissions, among other issues. The leaders “agreed to empower key senior officials to maintain communication and deepen constructive efforts on these and other issues,” said a White House reading of the meeting.
The Biden administration is waiting to see what China is prepared to do to make concrete progress, a U.S. official previously told the CNN 🇧🇷
A statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “the two countries will work together for the success of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
Kerry and Xie met on the sidelines of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh this week and last, but the exchanges were informal and not part of formal climate talks. kerry said to CNN last week that his hope of going to Egypt was to restart formal talks.
“Our hope is that, in a short time, it will be possible for us to come together again in full measure and do the things we need to do as the world’s top two emitters and as the world’s two largest economies. the world,” he said.
“China and the United States really need to cooperate on this. And without China, even if the US is moving towards a 1.5 degree program, which we are if we don’t have China, no one else can achieve that goal.”
(Kylie Atwood from CNN Ella Nilsen, Martin Goillandeau, David McKenzie, and Ingrid Formanek contributed to this text)
Source: CNN Brasil
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