Climate change is moving faster than we are: UN Secretary-General

The world has reached a “pivotal moment” and must change course in the next two years or risk runaway climate change, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the General Assembly.

“Climate change is moving faster than we are – and its speed has provoked a sonic boom SOS across our world. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the past two decades included 18 of the warmest years since record-keeping began in 1850. This year, for the first time, thick permanent sea ice north of Greenland began to break up. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the highest in 3 million years – and rising,” Mr Guterres told assembled heads of state and ministers.

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas was in New York to meet other UN agency heads and government ministers during the General Assembly. WMO is providing scientific advice to the UN Secretary-General, who has made climate change one of his top priorities.

Mr Taalas joined a special meeting on 26 September of over 20 Heads of State and attended the One Planet Climate Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron, focussing on raising ambition on climate action. The meetings took place amid what is known as “New York Climate Week” and comes on the heels of the Global Climate Action Summit, held in San Francisco earlier this month.

To mobilize greater action and finance, the UN Secretary-General will convene a Climate Summit in September 2019 to “focus on the heart of the problem.”

“We need greater ambition and a greater sense of urgency. We must guarantee the implementation of the Paris Agreement. It has immense potential to set us on the right course, but its targets -- which represent the bare minimum to avoid the worst impacts of climate change -- are far from being met,” Mr Guterres told the General Assembly.

He voiced concern that recent negotiations in Bangkok towards implementation guidelines ended without sufficient progress. The next Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP24, will take place in Poland in December. “It must be a success,” said Mr Guterres.

“Making matters worse, we — as a community of world leaders — are not doing enough.  We must listen to the earth’s best scientists,” said Mr Guterres.

The top-level activity at the General Assembly in New York comes just ahead of the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C on 8 October. 
 
The report will consider impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. It was requested by governments when they adopted the Paris Agreement on climate change, which aims at keeping global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to work to keep the increase as close as possible to 1.5 degrees.

UN Secretary-General speech to General Assembly is available here