Altmaier meets colleagues Korolec and Martin in Warsaw
Federal Environment Minister Altmaier and his colleagues from Poland, Marcin Korolec, and France, Philippe Martin, met today for the first Green Weimar Triangle meeting. The aim of the meeting was to exchange views on future international climate policies. Environment Minister Korolec hosted the event.
Poland will also host this year's Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in November. France will host the crucial 2015 conference, where a new global agreement on climate action is planned to be adopted. The ministers exchanged their views and expectations in a very cordial and open spirit and adopted a joint statement. They also agreed to cooperate closely to prepare the conferences in Warsaw and Paris.
Ensuring the trust of all participating countries is an important prerequisite for the international negotiations on climate action. For this reason, the three ministers consider it crucial that the commitments already made are fulfilled by 2020. In order to prevent dangerous climate change, the EU and the international community have to make even greater efforts. In Paris in 2015 at the latest, the parties will have to agree on further significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions for the time after 2020. The ministers agreed that climate financing will play a crucial role in the Warsaw conference. The establishment of the Green Climate Fund was an important step on the path to enhancing financing and using funds more effectively.
It was the first meeting of environment ministers in the framework of the Weimar Triangle, a series of meetings that has been used as a platform for coordinating European policies by other ministries of the three participating countries. The meetings were named after the location of the first event, the city of Weimar, to which the German Federal Foreign Minister invited his colleagues in 1991.