SEOUL UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said last week that climate change was the biggest threat facing the world and urged governments to reach a climate change agreement at a meeting in Denmark later this year. (Pictured: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon)Ban told the international media that the world had “less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet”.
“It is, simply, the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family,” Ban said in a keynote speech at a gathering in Seoul of the World Federation of UN Associations.
The UN chief however said there was reason for hope, citing the December meeting in Copenhagen, he said “we have a chance to put in place a climate change agreement that all nations can embrace, which will be equitable, balanced, comprehensible”.
The Copenhagen meeting is meant to negotiate a new UN-brokered climate treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. Ban called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”.
He also called on governments to “seal the deal in the name of humankind” through a “renewed multilateralism, a compassionate multilateralism”.
More than 100 heads of state and government are expected to attend a UN summit on climate change in New York next month and Ban urged the leaders to pressure their negotiators so a deal can be concluded in Copenhagen in December.
Though identifying climate change as the world’s biggest problem, Ban also said there were other serious threats to the world, including the proliferation of nuclear weapons, disease and hunger.
“We are living through an age of multiple crisis,” Ban said. “Fuel, flu and food, and most seriously, financial. Each is something not seen for years, even for generations. But now they are hitting us all at once.”
Post published in: Analysis