BALI: Despite warnings from the host country Indonesia that the world’s top economies must band together to fight global warming or risk entering “uncharted terrain,” the G20 climate talks in Bali came to a close without a consensus statement on Wednesday.
As the one-day summit on the vacation island came to a close, Indonesia’s environment minister announced that the G20 chair Jakarta will only release a summary of the summit’s goals, highlighting disagreements among its participants over how to address climate change.
At the end of a month in which more than 1,000 people died in Pakistan from flooding attributed to climate change and after a drought made worse by a record heatwave stretched across half of China, the failure to reach consensus on a statement was disappointing.
The report would outline the forum’s “common commitment and shared steps,” Indonesian Minister of Environment and Forestry Siti Nurbaya Bakar stated at a concluding press conference.It is a similar move to one that was made in July during finance talks in Indonesia, where the host country—which maintains a neutral foreign policy—issued a chair statement following a disagreement among ministers regarding Russia’s accountability for the world’s economic unrest in light of its invasion of Ukraine.
When questioned if there wasn’t a communique due of geopolitical differences, Bakar responded, “We cannot say that.””But the chair summary is something that we can achieve given the geopolitical constraints and (that) some nations cannot be flexible on particular topics.
