Bill Gates Rebuked by Island States for Downplaying Climate Risk
(Bloomberg) -- Nations among the most vulnerable to the damage wrought by global warming have decried the recent memo by Bill Gates criticizing a “doomsday view of climate change.”
Gates said last month that prioritizing the climate fight above all else risks overshadowing issues such as health and equality. He said human welfare should be put at the “heart” of strategies to deal with rising temperatures, and has since pledged to give $1.4 billion to farmers to adapt.
At the COP30 climate conference in the Amazonian city of Belém, however, representatives of small island states said Gates downplayed the threat and that their economies depend on keeping global warming below 1.5C. Coral reefs, for example, are vital to tourism and fishing in the Pacific, yet they face being decimated if temperatures climb much above that threshold.
“Science tells us that if we breach 2C, we’ll lose most of the coral cover that is essential to our economies — so over 90% of the coral reefs in our countries die,” said Ilana Seid, permanent representative to the United Nations for Palau, which chairs the Alliance of Small Island States. “It’s an existential crisis.”
Seid said that it is essential to speed up emissions cuts, or mitigation, to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
Nearly 200 countries at the UN summit in Brazil are currently negotiating over a potential road map to transition away from fossil fuels, as well as a possible new goal to boost finance for adaptation, where the investment case is often less strong than for new clean technologies.
The EU put forward a proposal Wednesday to create a “Mutirão Roadmap” to accelerate the energy transition, building on a global commitment two years ago to shift economies away from oil, gas and coal.
“We’ve articulated to everyone that really, we need to make sure that we deal not only with adaptation, but limited progress on mitigation,” Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate commissioner, told reporters.
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