Expert seeks $100bn yearly research, development funding to check climate change

Renowned environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, has called on world leaders to honour the 2015 agreement to double green energy research and development by 2020 and stop paying lip service to the task of fixing the climate.

Lomborg made the call as over 100 world leaders and 20,000 delegates from across the world converged at Glasgow for the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 26) Climate Change Conference that kicked off on Sunday.

He accused the G20 countries of not honouring the promise that they, alongside former U.S. President Barack Obama made in 2015 to double green energy research and development by 2020, citing that nothing has barely changed since.

According to the expert, there was a need to increase what was being currently spent on research and development to $100 billion yearly for better outcomes.

The environmentalist explained that the world is spending $600 billion in annual climate finance and they could take a sixth of that and use it in the smartest ways to help fix the climate.

READ ALSO: UK,Nigeria to address climate change challenges

Lomborg said Copenhagen Consensus experts had stressed the need to increase spending on research and development to $100 billion per year, which doesn’t mean that more money should be spent, but that what is available should be spent smarter.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the summit that it must act to save humanity and protect the planet, warning that the world was digging its grave.

The UN chief maintained that countries must keep the Paris deal goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius alive while calling for decarbonisation of global economies and the phase-out of coal.

He also urged global leaders to do more to protect vulnerable communities, adding that nearly four billion people suffered climate-related disasters over the last decade and the devastation will only grow.

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