The ongoing war in Ukraine and the fighting in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack must not distract the world from our collective priorities: reducing our carbon dioxide emissions, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050, preserving biodiversity and fighting poverty and inequality.
This is the doctrine France is implementing at an international level, through the Paris Pact for People and the Planet and the One Planet summits. The cornerstone of our strategy must be to speed up the ecological transition as well as the fight against poverty. After all, it is now crystal clear that no country will work to protect the planet if the price it must pay leads its citizens into a socioeconomic dead-end.
The world’s most advanced economies, which have also been the main CO2 emitters since the industrial revolution, must move away from fossil fuels. If we want to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, this is nonnegotiable.