United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson today emphasized the impact that climate change has on food security, peace and stability, and called on countries to cooperate to address this phenomenon.
“We usually say there is always a 'Plan B’, but there is no 'Planet B’. There is enough human-introduced carbon in the atmosphere to drive climate change for decades to come,” Mr. Eliasson told participants at the ministerial side event on climate change and its impact on foreign and security policy.
“We have to mitigate our emissions and we have to adapt. And we have to act now to stop things getting worse,” he said at the meeting, held on the margins of the high-level debate of the General Assembly’s 67th session.
Mr. Eliasson stressed that the only way to ensure energy, food and water security is to have a long-term strategy in place which allows countries to transition to sustainable, low-emission economies. He underlined the importance of establishing sustainable development goals as was agreed by countries during the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) earlier this year.
For the complete article, please see UN News Centre.
For the the speech of the German Foreign Minister, Dr. Guido Westerwelle at the German-Moroccan Side Event, please follow this link.
As we step into 2020, time has come to implement the Paris Agreement and raise climate ambition, but the geopolitical tide seems to be against it. The best way forward at this crucial juncture might be to forge a ‘climate coalition of the willing’ – recognising and streamlining actions of all actors at all levels.
For the first time in the survey’s 10-year outlook, the top five global risks in terms of likelihood are all environmental. They are: extreme weather events, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, major natural disasters, major biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and human-made environmental damage and disasters.
Millions of people across Sub-Saharan Africa could face grave hunger in the first half of 2020 because of armed conflict, political instability and climate change-linked disasters, a report says.
The report published by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) this month says that the countries affected will require life-saving food assistance and investment to prevent humanitarian catastrophes.
Australia is currently experiencing one of its worst bushfire seasons, with swathes of the southern and eastern coastal regions having been ablaze for weeks. As the fires have spread, there has been extensive media coverage both nationally and internationally documenting – and debating – their impacts. This Carbon Brief overview summarises how the fires – and the political response to them – have been covered by the media.