Prime Minister Dr Lotay Tshering presented to the United Nations (UN) Climate Action Summit on the Least Developed Countries’ (LDC) plans of making climate-resilient pathways by 2030 and ensuring net-zero emissions by 2050 on September 23. Lyonchhen also asked the global community to invest 450 million dollars as support over the next ten years to realise the plans.
Bhutan is the Chair of LDC.
Prime minister called on the world leaders to submit enhanced climate pledge and long term low greenhouse emission strategies by 2020. LDCs are ready with enhanced nationally determined contributions, national adaptation plans, and long term low carbon climate resilient strategies. He said there is a need for support to implement these initiatives.
“LDCs can do it. You can see the example of Bhutan. We are a small mountainous country. But with the visionary leadership of our Kings, we are carbon negative today. Many decades back when we used to talk about forests of Bhutan we always talked about the environment. We never talked about climate change before because we didn’t realise it will come so soon. But yet our farsighted visionary Kings have clearly held in our constitution that Bhutan must at least have 60 per cent of our country under forest cover and today we have 72 per cent and most of these forests are protected legally as biological corridors and national parks,” he said.
Also, he added that he fears he wouldn’t be able to handover the lush green forests, snow-capped mountains and crisp rivers of Bhutan to her next generation if the world does not commit to act now to address climate change.
Prime Minister Dr Lotay Tshering also reminded the world leaders that 1.5 degree Celsius temperature limit under the Paris Agreement is not enough.
He also reminded the international community that the LDC are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change.
The prime minister attended the UN Climate Action Summit in New York ahead of the UN General Assembly.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the world leaders to come with concrete and realistic plans to implement the Paris Agreement which mandates member countries to maintain global temperature rise below 1.5 degree Celsius by reducing emissions.
Phub Gyem
