ROMA (ITALPRESS) – The warm tower that hit the northern hemisphere in recent months, the devastating fires and mortal floods are a warning about what awaits us. The United Nations Secretary General Antònio Guterres said this, commenting on the report of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep).
“We are destined to exceed the 1.5 °C limit within the next few years. The struggle to limit the increase in temperature to 1.5 degrees is a struggle for humanity,” he explained. “In the whole world, extreme heat waves are already demonstrating that climate impacts will be felt faster, with greater intensity and longer, causing a greater number of victims and deeper upheavals. It is time to double efforts to counter climate change. We can and must take the right path, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening resilience and adaptation and ensuring that the overcoming of the 1.5 °C temperature increase is as low as possible.”.
Guterres recalled that in the historic Paris Agreement of 2015 on climate change the world leaders had committed to maintaining the increase of temperature within the limit of 1.5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels, a goal that, according to scientists, is fundamental to avoid the worst climatic devastation.
“We must ensure that the threshold is as small and short as possible, limiting the extent of the increase in temperatures and the duration of their stay above 1.5 °C,” Guterres explains.
This requires the acceleration of the gradual elimination of fossil fuels and the revolution of renewable energies, the drastic reduction of methane pollution and the protection of land, forests and oceans. “The solutions are at hand and the world has never been so well equipped to put them into practice. Now is the time to raise the asticella and accelerate the action,” he concludes.
(ITALPRESS)
– photos: Ipa Agency –
