Spanish
The Government of Denmark presented this Thursday its new climate target for the year 2035, one of the most ambitious in the world, as it contemplates a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 82% compared to 1990 emissions.
"We have set a new and ambitious climate target and prioritized the necessary funding. In this way, we take responsibility for both the target and how to achieve it," said Danish Minister for Climate, Energy and Public Utilities, Lars Aagaard, in a statement.
To support this goal, the Danish government announced that it will allocate 4 billion Danish kroner (approximately 520 million euros) annually for the next 15 years, reaching a total of 60 billion kroner (around 7.8 billion euros).
You can also read: El Salvador processes more than 200 gang members, 17 of them sentenced to 130 years in prisonb
"The fight against climate change is not free, and even less so when we aspire to more ambitious goals. When setting a new target, we must also consider its cost and who will pay for it; otherwise, great ambitions are nothing more than empty words," said Aagaard. The Danish minister stated that "we must be responsible" even in such an unpredictable time as the present, in which attention must also be paid to issues such as climate adaptation, social welfare, and defense. The statement highlighted that Denmark was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a climate law with a reduction target in 2019 and now there is a greater knowledge base about the price of the green transition than six years ago. "We are in a different situation than in 2019, when the last target was set. The easiest fruits to achieve have already been harvested and the path to more ambitious goals is more difficult," warned Aagaard. However, the minister pointed out that there is the possibility of increasing the target later if conditions change and showed himself open to dialogue with the opposition parties. The Danish government had been negotiating its proposal with the rest of the parties in Parliament since mid-November, but did not get the support of any other political force, as the opposition aimed for an even higher target, of 85%. "It's very unambitious and amounts to not lifting a finger to improve the climate from here to 2035, because forecasts indicate that, in any case, we will end up reaching that point," said Samira Nawa, climate spokesperson for the Radical Liberal Party, to the Ritzau agency.
