Joint statement following the visit of COP26 President-Designate Alok Sharma to Austria
COP26 President-Designate Alok Sharma and Austrian Minister for Climate Action Leonore Gewessler met on 30 June 2021 in Vienna.
COP26 President-Designate Alok Sharma and Austrian Minister for Climate Action Leonore Gewessler met on 30 June 2021 in Vienna. They released the following statement:
Today, with just four months to go until the COP26 summit, we agreed our determination to drive forward multilateral collaboration as well as domestic action for building the conditions for success at Glasgow. COP26 will be a crucial moment for demonstrating our collective commitment to keeping 1.5 degrees within reach, guided by the latest available science, and reaffirming our commitment to the Paris Agreement.
We resolved that an ‘all of society’ inclusive approach to climate action is essential for the success of COP26 and we were both pleased to attend the Austrian World Summit this week. We jointly congratulate the efforts of all those involved in organising the Summit, which emphasised the clear need for the Public and Private sector to collaborate in parallel with Civil Society, in order to achieve an ambitious and inclusive outcome at COP26.
In this context, we also discussed the urgent need to scale up climate finance going towards the $100bn goal to mobilise financial flows for both mitigation and adaptation. We noted the positive climate finance announcements from the G7, and the need to build on this momentum, including increasing adaptation finance, leading up to COP26. Likewise, we agreed that private finance will be instrumental in aligning and delivering financial flows for climate action in line with the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Crucial to this is establishing global reporting standards, and to this end we agreed that more investors should disclose in line with TCFD.
Finally, we agreed to continue working closely together to push for ambitious climate action both domestically and internationally, and reaffirmed our commitment to achieving a strong negotiated outcome at COP26, including through finalising the outstanding elements of the Paris Rulebook, in order to ensure full implementation of the Paris Agreement.