The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, said today that subsidizing fossil fuels amounts to “subsidizing suicide,” warning of the need to protect nature.
Guterres’ statement occurred at a preparatory meeting for the COP17 biodiversity summit, which will take place in Armenia starting Monday.
Hydrocarbons “are boiling our planet and constitute a scourge for biodiversity,” the UN secretary-general said in the same speech in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
“The hard truth is that we are spending our money on the wrong causes. For every dollar invested in protecting nature, 30 dollars are allocated to its destruction,” Guterres said.
States have struggled to reduce subsidies to nature-harming activities — a commitment that, however, states assumed in 2022 and whose progress will be reviewed at COP17, which begins on Monday.
Countries are expected to meet the targets by 2030; however, as with subsidies to “harmful” activities, they are behind on almost all goals, said Guterres.
The Armenia summit will produce a balance of progress made in recent years and explore ways to accelerate action.
Earlier in October, 130 companies, including BNP Paribas, Danone and Hermès, published a letter addressed to States, urging them to “reform financial incentives,” estimated at $2.6 billion a year, which still direct an excessive amount of public money to activities that cause the “exhaustion of natural resources.”
