Sunday 19 / May / 2024
UN/New York: World leaders at the United Nations General Assembly were warned that the they had little over a decade to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.
The remarks were made during a high-level meeting on the relationship between climate change and sustainable development.
UN Secretary General António Guterres said, "Climate change is happening now and to all of us. Every week brings a new example of climate-related devastation. No country or community is immune.
"My heart goes out to the hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of people affected by the recent cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Such events are becoming more frequent, more severe and more widespread and will become even worse unless we act urgently, now."
Guterres said that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced "by 45 per cent over the next decade and get to net zero emissions globally by 2050.”
"So, today, and every day, my appeal is clear and simple. We need action, ambition and political will. More action, more ambition and more political will," Guterres said in his closing remarks.
General Assembly President María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés warned attendees that "we are the last generation that can prevent irreparable damage to our planet”.
“Eleven years is all we have ahead of us to change our direction,” she said, citing the findings of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
“2019 must be the year of climate action at all levels,” Garcés stressed, adding “Climate justice is intergenerational justice.”
"Worldwide, thousands of students continue to mobilise around the message that we do not have a planet B and there is no future without a planet," she said, calling for their pleas not to fall on deaf ears.
Garcés, taking inspiration from the students demanding climate action, called on world leaders to make 2020 the last year carbon emissions increase due to human activity.
Prime Minister of Fiji, Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, added, "The time for talking and listening must now give way to action." Noting that technologies existed to de-carbonise, Bainimarama stated that political will was missing.
Addressing the real‑life impact of climate change was Shedona Richardson, youth representative of Grenada, addressed the real life impact of climate change at the meeting. She stated that to her, climate change and global warming were ambiguous terms until her life, and that of her fellow Grenadians, was forever altered by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
“That was the day mother nature fought back after being treated so unkindly for so long,” Shedona said, adding that the international community is failing to act as small island developing States face the existential threat of climate change.
Addressing the heads of state and government present at the meeting, she said, “Our future is in your hands, do not let the hope of the world be in vain.”
