UN doubles down on renewable energy on World Environment Day

Jun 05, 2022 News

…as Paris Agreement to limit global temperature by 1.5 degrees will likely fail

Kaieteur News – Today, Guyana joins the world in observance of World Environment Day under the theme: “Only One Earth,” which is a simple statement of fact, according to United Nations’ Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres warns Paris Agreement to limit global temperature by 1.5 degrees will likely fail

The observation this year is being held against the backdrop of a likely failure on the part of the Developed World to meet its global commitments with regards the reduction of carbon emissions.
According to Guterres, “there is a 50/50 chance that annual average global temperatures will breach the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next five years.”
With this in mind, he laid out a five-point plan of action aimed at meeting the challenges head on with alacrity with specific focus on renewable energy.
According to Guterres, close to half of humanity is already in the climate danger zone and are “15 times more likely to die from climate impacts such as extreme heat, floods and drought.”
To that end, the Secretary General in his World Environment Day address said, “I have proposed five concrete recommendations to dramatically speed up the deployment of renewable energy everywhere, including making renewable technologies and raw materials available to all, cutting red tape, shifting subsidies and tripling investment.”
He was adamant “businesses need to put sustainability at the heart of their decision-making for the sake of humanity and their own bottom line. A healthy planet is the backbone of nearly every industry on earth.”
He said too that as voters and consumers “we must make our actions count: from the policies we support, to the food we eat, to the transport we choose, to the companies we support. We can all make environmentally friendly choices that will add up to the change we need.”
The UN Secretary General was adamant, women and girls, in particular, can be forceful agents of change but underscored, “they must be empowered and included in decision-making at all levels.”
Likewise, he said, “indigenous and traditional knowledge must also be respected and harnessed to help protect our fragile ecosystems.”
In his plea, the UN Secretary General espoused, “This planet is our only home. It is vital we safeguard the health of its atmosphere, the richness and diversity of life on earth, its ecosystems and its finite resources. But we are failing to do so. We are asking too much of our planet to maintain ways of life that are unsustainable. Earth’s natural systems cannot keep up with our demands.”
Elaborating further on the dire situation that faces the global community, Guterres noted that already more than three billion people are affected by degraded ecosystems and that “pollution is responsible for some nine million premature deaths each year; more than one million plant and animal species risk extinction, many within decades.”
Compounding the situation, Guterres predicted that more than 200 million people each year could be displaced by climate disruption by 2050.
The recent Stockholm+50 environment meeting reiterated that all 17 Sustainable Development Goals rely on a healthy planet, he reminded and called on global leaders and businesses to “all take responsibility to avert the catastrophe being wrought by the triple crises of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.”
Governments, he said, need urgently to prioritise climate action and environmental protection through policy decisions that promote sustainable progress.
According to Guterres, “this year and the next will present more opportunities for the global community to demonstrate the power of multilateralism to tackle our intertwined environmental crises, from negotiations on a new global biodiversity framework to reverse nature loss by 2030 to the establishment of a treaty to tackle plastics pollution.”
The United Nations, he pledged, is committed to leading the cooperative global efforts, “because the only way forward is to work with nature, not against it.”
His conclusion, “together we can ensure that our planet not only survives, but thrives, because we have Only One Earth.”

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