This morning over one hundred world leaders including Nigeria’s President Mohammadu Buhari will gather at UN Headquarters in New York to take stock of their commitment on climate change, accelerate progress on sustainable development, and respond to other issues of global concern.
Some are revising climate plans previously submitted under the Paris Agreement that stretch until 2025 or 2030, while others are preparing longer-term strategies to decarbonize their economies. For UN Secretary-General Anthonio Guterres, there is no time to lose in the face of climate change, rising inequality, increasing hatred and intolerance; and what he described as an “alarming” number of peace and security challenges.
Nigerian Amina Mohammed who doubles as the UN Deputy Secretary-General explained that “the Summit will present practical and new measures to, one: speed up the transition from coal to clean energy and to cut the pollution that is harming our health,” she said, and secondly, “protect nature but also unlock the potential of nature to deliver on climate solutions”.
She recapped that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stressed the need to ensure that “the global temperature rise does not go beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius” through “cutting emissions by 45 per cent by 2030”, warning that “we have very little time to take the decisions needed to get there”.