UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that whole cities will disappear in the near future due to the global temperature increase.
“We say goodbye to whole cities – Miami, Alexandria, Shanghai. All lost beneath the waves”, he said during his opening speech at the COP26 summit.
“We are quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with the speed and abruptness that is entirely man-made,” he said.
Representatives of over 190 countries are participating in the summit organised by the United Nations.
COP26, which is running until 12 November, comes amidst unprecedented climate challenges that have afflicted all regions across the world.
Alok Sharma, a UK minister and the summit’s president, called the Glasgow conference the world’s “last best hope” for limiting global warming to one and a half degrees Celcius.
Pope’s Message
Pope Francis has earlier urged world leaders to take “radical decisions” at next week’s global environmental summit.
The Pope talked of crises including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and economic difficulties. He further urged the world to respond to them with vision and radical decisions. He also called not to “waste opportunities” that the current challenges present.
“We can confront these crises by retreating into isolationism, protectionism and exploitation. Or we can see in them a real chance for change, he further said.
Earlier, an UN-appointed panel of experts said that the earth is getting so hot
that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past the most ambitious threshold
set in the Paris accord.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the report as a “code red” for humanity.
He stressed that it “must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy the planet.”
