The UN secretary-general called on Wednesday for the leaders of the planet hit by global warming to act to “lower the temperature” and avoid “drowning” the world.
“I have just returned from Pakistan where I glimpsed the future. A future of permanent and widespread chaos on an unimaginable scale,” Antonio Guterres said at a press conference days before dozens of heads of state and government ended in New York. for the high-level week of the General Assembly.
“What is happening in Pakistan demonstrates the inadequacy of the global response to the climate crisis and the betrayal and injustice at the heart of this crisis.”
“Lower the temperature, now”
For this reason, “my message to the world leaders who will meet here is clear: lower the temperature, now. Do not flood the world today. Do not drown it tomorrow,” he insisted, denouncing “decades of ‘intransigence of the large emitters’ by the that ‘the most vulnerable pay the price’, in particular the G20.
“If a third of the G20 countries were under water today, as they might be tomorrow, perhaps they could more easily drastically reduce their emissions.”
He also accused the big fossil fuel producing corporations of “killing the planet to get as much as possible”.
“The acidity of nationalism and selfishness”
Beyond the climate crisis, the Secretary General expressed his concern about the divisions in the international community.
“Geostrategic divisions have never been greater since at least the Cold War,” he said, “crippling the global response to the challenges” we face in a world “damaged by war and climate, bruised by hate, covered in shame by poverty”. and inequality.
“The solidarity imagined by the Charter of the United Nations is swallowed by the acidity of nationalism and selfishness,” he lamented.
Source: BFM TV
