Cuba Shares Its Environmental Development Experience at COP26

On Oct. 31, Cuba's Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA) Secretary Elba Perez arrived in Glasgow to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Summit (COP26).

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Besides urging the world's richest countries to transform their economies to contain global warming, she will share some of her nation's experiences in dealing with climate change.

On Wednesday, there will be a panel to examine Cuba’s efforts to transition its energy sector towards renewable energies. Currently, this Caribbean country is an example of a small nation that has staked its future on achieving breakthroughs in renewable energies.

The country has set ambitious goals for itself as part of its "Task Life", the Cuban plan for adaptation and mitigation of climate change. Some of them include modernizing the infrastructure and industry to include clean technologies and processes, counteracting soil degradation and drought, promoting sustainable management of forests and recovering degraded ones, and implementing economic incentives to achieve financial sustainability of ecosystems.

While CITMA is the institution responsible for planning, implementing, and evaluating the Cuban environmental policy, every ministry and public organization has to include in its strategic guidelines ways to promote positive environmental action, which encompasses reduction of energy consumption, local projects to preserve biodiversity, and raising public awareness of the issue. 

“Industrialized countries, the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, can't avoid their responsibility with shy promises. The existence of human species and the future of our planet is at stake,” Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez said.

“The causes for climate change are no longer disputed: the irrational and increasingly unsustainable patterns of production and consumption of capitalism and the excessive exploitation of natural resources have dramatically accelerated the danger of extinction of the human species. Stopping this rampage is of the utmost urgency, although those who promote it seem to ignore it,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel’s Diaz-Canel said at the United Nations General Assembly on Oct. 27.