UN News: “Peru is one of the most vulnerable countries,” Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra Cornejo said. “Our great biodiversity is the principal natural capital on which we rely and thus climate change and extreme climatic events like droughts and deluges put us in a particularly vulnerable position.”
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto highlighted the importance of implementing the UN’s Paris climate accord, which seeks to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change by keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius above industrial levels by the end of the century.
President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands, a low-lying Pacific atoll nation little more than one metre above sea level, which is threatened with annihilation by rising oceans, called for urgent implementation of the Paris accord.
“The future of the Marshall Islands hangs in the balance,” she warned. “But it is not just us, even if, as an atoll nation, we are the most vulnerable. We are joined not only by other small island developing States, but many other countries who face serious challenges posed by climate impacts.”
Seychelles President Danny Faure warned that peace and prosperity cannot be disassociated from the effects of climate change and its existential threat to the world as a whole. “Neglecting the effects of climate change will pass on to the next generation a world beyond repair,” he said.
Speaking from the opposite spectrum of low-lying island States, President Sooronbay Jeenbekov of the high mountain Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, warned that climate change is having an increasing impact on the glaciers and water resources in his country, contributing to the growth of natural disasters.
Neglecting the effects of climate change will pass on to the next generation a world beyond repair – Seychelles President Danny Faure
Many leaders recounted the problems and achievements of their own countries. But they also highlighted the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which seek to eliminate a host of social ills in an environmentally friendly way by 2030, and underscored the UN’s prime role in attaining the global partnership needed to combat climate change and resolve a slew of other problems, including the current worldwide migration crisis.
A discordant note came from United States President Donald Trump, who rejected the ideology of globalism, opposed the new Global Compact on Migration, scheduled to be adopted in Morocco in December, and complained that the US’s trading partners had taken advantage of it, explaining his policy of unilaterally imposing billions of dollars in import tariffs.
