Uganda's bold and brave activist slams African and EU leaders for already breaking COP26 promises

Vanessa Nakate is a climate justice activist from Kampala, Uganda. She founded the Rise Up Movement Africa and campaigns internationally on climate change and its impacts. Here she gives us her take on the disappointing outcomes from COP26 and why we need to keep global average temperature below 1.5º C. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to speak in a high-level plenary to world leaders at COP26 in Glasgow. It was towards the end of the conference when leaders were congratulating themselves for all the progress that had been made — they were telling the outside world that they had kept the prospect of limiting global warming to 1.5C "alive". I gave them a simple message – that we, the people, felt betrayed by the broken promises they’d made in the past and that we didn’t believe they would keep the new promises they were making. Then I asked them to prove us wrong. That was only three months ago. What have European and African leaders done since then? The UK’s COP President Alok Sharma is demanding that low-income countries, who have done relatively little to create the climate crisis, raise their levels of climate action ambition. Yet, just weeks after his government called on other countries to “consign coal to history”, Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave permission to massively expand a coal mine in Wales. A few weeks later, the UK announced it was giving a green light to a new oil and gas field in the North Sea - and considering six more fossil fuel developments. Not to be outdone, the EU decided that natural gas should be considered “sustainable" as part of its new Taxonomy — allowing dirty gas to receive investments that should be going into clean energy. The current draft has the potential to label 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions as ‘green’. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/17/vanessa-nakate-african-and-eu-leaders-are-already-breaking-cop26-promises