Reasons for optimism

Despite many setbacks, a number of achievements towards greater environmental protection in the past decade is cause for optimism, Achim Steiner, former executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, tells Bernhard Pötter in an interview with German newspaper taz. “Since the Paris Agreement we have a global climate policy, the G7 has agreed to end fossil fuels in the long term, the so-called decarbonisation. Then the Montreal Protocol, the most successful UN agreement ever, ensured that the ozone hole closed,” Steiner said. In addition, the UN has set 17 Sustainable Development Goals that have become mandatory by the countries that adopted them — “a breakthrough for greater sustainability that we did not expect,” Steiner added.

Read the article in German here.     

See a CLEW factsheet on Germany's climate targets and greenhouse gas emissions.