Prime Minister James Marape has commended American President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on their climate change mitigation stand.
Biden and Jinping were both in attendance at the APEC Economic Leaders’ Week in San Francisco from November 11–17. The two leaders discussed their commitment to migrating from heavy fossil fuels to clean green energy and net-zero emissions by 2050.
“I commend President Biden and President Xi for this remarkable step they have taken,” Marape said.
“Both the US and China are big carbon emitters with huge environmental footprints, so for them to commit to aggressively shift away from fossil fuel use and extraction is a highly commendable.”
Marape also repeated his calls for access to fair trade among all economics of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to combat poverty and unsustainable resource use.
“If it wasn’t for industrialisation, which has unfortunately become the cause of pollution in the last 100 years and ultimately become the main issue we now face in climate change, poverty would have forced the unsustainable plunder of Earth’s resources,” he said.
“This is why it is imperative that APEC must ensure that all member countries prosper through fair trade.”
Marape has been vocal in the past about forest conservation as a means to combat climate change, marketing PNG as a ‘forest nation’.
“Climate change conversations will not be complete without conversations on forests and forestry management,” he said. “The mitigation efforts must be clearly progressed. The mitigation efforts must be clearly progressed.”
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