“Floods, droughts, heat waves, fires and extreme storms only get worse and break records with disturbing frequency”, Guterres said in a video message alongside the publication of a climate report from the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
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“Heat waves in Europe. Colossal floods in Pakistan. Severe and prolonged droughts in China, the Horn of Africa and the United States. There is nothing natural about the new magnitude of these disasters.”, he said.
“They represent the price of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels”, said the secretary general, who calls for the abandonment of carbon and the development of renewable energy.
O WMO report (*), released a few weeks before the COP27 climate summit, scheduled for November in Egypt, shows that the world is “going in the wrong direction” in the face of climate change and its catastrophic consequences.
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Concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to increase and break new records and emissions linked to fossil energy are already above pre-covid-19 pandemic levels.
According to preliminary data cited in the report, global CO2 emissions between January and May this year are 1,2% higher than those in the same period in 2019. This growth is driven by the United States, India and “the majority” of European countries, according to the authors.
And the warming linked to human activity is unrelenting.
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The report's authors estimate that there is a 93% chance that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest year on record, which, so far, is 2016.
“All countries need to increase their national climate ambitions every year until we are headed in the right direction”, said Guterres.
The UN Secretary-General asked the group G20 of the world's main economies that “shows the way” by being “responsible for 80% of global emissions”.
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Antonio Guterres called it a “scandal” that developed countries, in his opinion, have not taken seriously the issues of adapting to the effects of climate change and have ignored their commitments to help poorer countries.
Guterres asked them to “fully” respect the commitment made at COP26 in Glasgow to pay 40 billion dollars annually to adapt to the effects of the global warming.
Adaptation funding must increase to at least $300 billion annually by 2030, he said.
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(With AFP)
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