UN Secretary-General: Climate Change is the Most Important Issue Facing the World

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, on Monday at the United Nations conference on climate change in Poland urged world leaders to take the issue of global warming seriously and take action. According to Reuters, the UN Secretary-General stated: "Climate change is the most important issue we face." He emphasized that despite witnessing the destructive impacts of climate change causing chaos worldwide, we are not doing enough and are not moving quickly enough to prevent irreversible and catastrophic changes. Carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere reached a new record in 2017. The UN conference on climate change, which will last for two weeks, began on Monday with the participation of dozens of world leaders in Katowice, Poland. Climate change is described as "the biggest threat in thousands of years." In this context, David Attenborough, the renowned British documentary filmmaker and environmental activist, called on world leaders to confront "the biggest threat in thousands of years." Attenborough, known for his numerous documentaries on nature and wildlife, recently examined the devastating effects of environmental pollution on oceans in a documentary titled "Blue Planet - Part Two." Attenborough, who is attending the conference as one of the "people's representatives," stated: "World leaders, you must lead. The survival of our civilizations and the nature we depend on is in your hands." Recent research shows that the rate of global warming is far exceeding the targets set in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. The Poland conference is the most significant UN climate change meeting since then, with its main goal being to establish regulations and implementation requirements for the Paris Agreement. However, it seems that the UN and world leaders have not yet been able to establish the urgency needed for necessary actions to reduce fossil fuel consumption, which is one of the main goals of the Paris Agreement. Representatives from some major powers, which are the most polluting countries in the world, are absent from the Poland conference, and the US government intends to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Reuters adds that technical negotiations among delegations from about 200 countries began on Sunday with the aim of increasing the likelihood of an agreement. The main topic of these discussions is to set regulations and implementation requirements to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, which was one of the significant achievements of the Paris meeting. The Deputy Minister of Environment of Poland and the head of this conference stated that without success at the Katowice conference, the Paris Agreement will not succeed, as that agreement only specifies goals and not methods to achieve them. In part of his speech, he said: "The wave of optimism and global cooperation from the Paris meeting has waned and is now shaky." Nevertheless, he found the commitment of the G20 countries, which emphasized their commitment to the Paris Agreement in their recent summit's final statement in Argentina, encouraging. The US government did not accept this commitment. A series of scientific studies published in recent months have shown a stark difference between rhetoric and practical actions to reduce pollution from fossil fuel consumption. Attenborough also stated in another part of his speech: "The speed of global warming is outpacing our actions in this regard. We must accelerate practical actions before it is too late." "We are facing a global catastrophe that is the result of human activities. Climate change is the biggest threat in thousands of years."