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A special session of the Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030 (P4G) Seoul Summit is being held at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul on Monday. (Yonhap News)

The 2021 P4G Seoul Summit will be held on Sunday and Monday. P4G stands for “Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals.”

The leaders of over 40 countries will be taking part in the videoconference to discuss ways to respond to climate change and achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The P4G Seoul Summit is significant as the first multilateral summit in the area of the environment to be hosted in South Korea.

The summit’s theme of achieving the vision of carbon neutrality through an inclusive green recovery is also timely since major countries around the world are pursuing a “green new deal” as a strategy for overcoming COVID-19. We hope the summit will give South Korea a chance to establish itself as an unquestioned leader in taking action on climate change.

Participants at the P4G Seoul Summit will represent governments and international organizations, companies in the private sector, and nonprofit organizations. The goal is to develop responses to climate change in five areas (food and agriculture, water, energy, cities, and circular economies) that can be provided to developing countries.

Following a debate between national leaders on Monday, the participating countries are expected to adopt a “Seoul Declaration” to express the need for international solidarity and cooperation to overcome climate change. We hope the statement will express a firm commitment to implementing the Paris Climate Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a challenge facing the entire world.

2021 is the first year of implementation of the Paris Agreement, which was adopted in 2015. In other words, this is the year when each country is supposed to start working to achieve the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals they submitted to the UN.

At the end of last year, South Korea submitted the goal of cutting its 2017 greenhouse gas emissions by 24.4% by 2030. But that goal was rejected as insufficient.

In its “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC,” published in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that countries must cut 2010 greenhouse gas emissions by at least 45% by 2030 to avoid a climate catastrophe.

South Korea’s reduction goals only represented 18.3% of its 2010 level. Even worse, South Korea is among the ten countries with the most greenhouse gas emissions. That has earned it the moniker of “climate villain” from international environmental groups.

South Korean environmental groups earlier announced a boycott of the P4G Seoul Summit and are now organizing press conferences and hunger strikes near the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, where the summit is being held. These groups complain that the government has made numerous pronouncements but taken little action on the climate crisis.

The slogan of the P4G Seoul Summit is “action for the planet before it’s too late.” What’s needed now is not words but concrete action. The first step is bringing our emission reduction goals in line with the demands of the international community.

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