??DAVOS: Minister for International Cooperation of the Government of Egypt, Rania Mashat and Federal Minister for Climate Change, Pakistani Senator Sherry Rehman remarked the urgency of cooperation to address the challenges of climate change at a special panel organized by the Maryan Forum Foundation during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.
During the session chaired by former BBC World News presenter Nik Gowing, Rehman said that climate change and biodiversity are critical issues that require better collaborations between actors are needed to meet the climate action targets.
“We must build coalitions for climate action,” the Pakistani minister said.
“So far, we have mostly been talking and working in silos due to the boundaries we have set on ourselves. Everyone is speaking about the individual actions they are taking but we need to move beyond that to a surface with achievable collective action targets and then pledge to actually meet them.”
The panel also discussed the issue of denialism that still exists amongst corporate leaders and networks, highlighting the “collective failure” to take the public conversations around climate change to the required level.
Participants stressed the criticality of climate change and biodiversity loss arguing that to address the issue “we require a scientific approach that guides our decisions, but current efforts have fallen short.”
“Our models of business and government need to change for that critical mass that is needed to shift the needle on biodiversity loss and climate action because we are way off the mark,” Rehman said.
Panelists also emphasized that the 20th century international financial architecture, which was designed to solve distinct difficulties, is now out of date for the crises of the twenty-first century.
“We need a redesign of the entire Bretton Woods financial architecture and make climate financing agile and easily available for countries that are at the forefront of climate stress,” Rehman said.??”If we do not take collective and radical actions within this decade, what is happening in Pakistan will come to Davos someday, but after 1/3 of the globe is living in the 19th century again that has bred from our lack of collective action,” she added.
The panel discussion ended with Khalid Janahi, founder of Vision 3, pre-launched his upcoming book ‘From Rulership to Leadership in the Arab World.’