ENVIRONMENT: Nature is angry as time runs out – UN

UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, opened the Climate Action Summit on Monday, September 23 with a message of urgency, but also of hope: “We are running out of time, but it is not too late.”

“The climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win. The climate crisis is caused by us and the solutions must come from us. We have the tools: technology is on our side,” Guterres said in a speech before dozens of international leaders.

He said insisted  that  Monday’s meeting was not a Summit of speeches or negotiations, but a meeting for “action” that must show concrete commitments.

The Climate Action Summit involves some 60 heads of state and government, which together with local and regional authorities and business managers will present new plans that they have developed individually or in coalitions.

The main absentee from the summit was climate change skeptic, US  President Donald Trump, who took his country out of the Paris Accord.

“My generation has failed in its responsibility to protect our planet. That must change,” Guterres said in his first address to the Summit, in which he praised the mobilization of young people on the streets.

“Young people are offering solutions, insisting on responsibility, demanding urgent action. They do the right thing,” he said.

Guterres ,noted the recent natural disasters in several countries such as the Bahamas and the record temperatures that are recorded globally as a preview of the future to come if there is no change of course.

“Nature is angry. And we deceive ourselves if we believe that we can deceive nature because nature always strikes back. Throughout the world, nature is returning the blow with fury,” he said.

Guterres said  that the response to climate change requires “fundamental

transformations” in all aspects of society, changes that will have costs, but insisted that the biggest cost is “doing nothing.”

The Portuguese diplomat focused especially on the need to end fossil fuel subsidies and the importance of stopping building more and more coal plants.

“It’s time to move taxes on carbon wages and tax pollution, not people,” he said.

Guterres also urged to meet the objectives of reducing emissions by 45% by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, in order to limit the temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5 degrees  Celsius by the end of the century.