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DUBAI — Rishi Sunak defended his choice to solely attend the COP28 local weather summit for a half a day, saying it might be flawed to “measure our influence right here by hours spent.”
The U.Ok. prime minister left the Dubai summit for his return flight to the U.Ok. on Friday night, having solely arrived within the UAE 11 hours earlier.
Different world leaders have devoted extra time to the U.N. local weather convention and the U.Ok.’s personal head of state, King Charles III, attended for 2 full days.
“It’s vastly simplistic to measure the influence of our presence right here by the hours we spend,” Sunak stated in response to a POLITICO query at a press convention Friday.
He stated: “You might be saying to me, ’you need to be right here for 3 days.’ However that may imply nothing if I hadn’t come residence with £10 billion of funding in an offshore wind farm, creating jobs and offering clear vitality, or I hadn’t been in a position to announce more cash for local weather finance.”
“I really feel excellent that this has been a really productive day,” he added. ”However it’s not the one day that we concentrate on tackling local weather change.”
Sunak has confronted criticism from inexperienced advocates at residence for rowing again on key internet zero targets and giving the go-ahead to new oil and gasoline exploration licences within the North Sea. On the day of his arrival on the summit, one in every of his former ministers, Zac Goldsmith, stated the U.Ok.’s standing on the world stage on local weather had been “diminished in current months.”
In the meantime, Keir Starmer, the chief of the Labour opposition — who arrived on the summit on Thursday and departs on Sunday — accused Sunak of missing “seriousness” on local weather. “The smallness of his politics is changing into a characteristic of his politics,” Starmer advised reporters in Dubai.
However Sunak cited a significant new funding in U.Ok. offshore wind introduced in Dubai and new funding commitments for poorer nations among the many key achievements introduced by the U.Ok. on the summit.
He stated he had not encountered any negativity in regards to the U.Ok.’s current local weather insurance policies, saying: ”Hand on coronary heart, one hundred pc, no. Not a single chief that I’ve spoken to right this moment has spoken about that.”
Sunak reiterated his place that local weather motion wants to come back with a consideration of the price of residing pressures on strange individuals and insisted that ”we can’t deal with local weather change except we take individuals with us,” warning starkly that ”local weather politics is near breaking level.”