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Flashpoint: H.E. Iván Duque Márquez, Former President, Republic of Colombia

Speaker:

H.E. Iván Duque Márquez, Former President, Republic of Colombia; Concordia Leadership Council Member

Key Takeaways & Next Steps:

  • The public sector should have the immediate objective of reducing the financial burden upon individuals. To achieve this, the public sector should up its efforts to build smart grids to make use of renewable energy technologies, provide sustainable financing sources, and create logical taxonomies/classifications to avoid greenwashing in investment strategies. In addition, further work must be undertaken to provide connectivity to the many in the region who are without, in order to improve access to information and streamline business processes.
  • The public sector has a responsibility to ensure the codified and enforced protection of at least 30% of land areas by 2030, including protecting large coral reefs from the effects of trawling and protecting large swaths of tropical rainforest and jungle from the effects of deforestation. Necessary to achieving this will be ensuring a harsher prosecution of eco-criminals who violate such laws.
  • Internationally, we should ensure cooperation to ensure the protection of key land areas, with steps taken to mobilize capital through bodies such as the IMF. 
  • We cannot ask the region to halt its mission toward energy and food security, but together we should look to adjust processes; for example, in the case of agriculture, we should discuss the use of alternative irrigation methods, the use of silver pastures, and ways to boost productivity per hectare in an effort to achieve low-carbon agriculture.
  • In our efforts to drive a renewable energy transition, we can look to modernize methods; for example, we should look to improve access to gas for use in cooking to reduce reliance on carbon-intensive wood burning.
  • While we seek to protect existing wildlife areas, we should also look for ways to expand efforts to achieve more biodiverse cities as a method to offset emissions. 

“If we embrace the right policies and give the right signals, we’ll be able to turn Latin America and the Caribbean into a land of opportunity.”

 
H.E. Iván Duque Márquez, Former President, Republic of Colombia; Concordia Leadership Council Member

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