Source The United Nations
Media www.rajawalisiber.com – Secretary – General António Guterres today (30 Oct) in Nepal issued an urgent call to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, “to avert the worst of climate chaos” and stop the melting glaciers and ice sheets.
The Secretary-General said, “the rooftops of the world are caving in” noting that Nepal “has lost close to one-third of its ice in just over thirty years” while Antarctica and Greenland “are losing billions of tons of ice mass every year.”
Melting glaciers, he said, “mean swollen lakes and rivers flooding, sweeping away entire communities; and seas rising at record rates – threatening coastal communities across the globe.”
Guterres explained that Nepal’s glaciers “melted sixty-five per cent faster in the last decade than they had in the previous one.”
He said, “glaciers in the Himalayas supply fresh water to well over a billion people, when they shrink, so do river flows. In the future, major Himalayan rivers like the Indus, the Ganges and Brahmaputra could have massively reduced flows. Combined with saltwater intrusion, that would decimate deltas. That spells catastrophe: Low-lying countries and communities erased forever; millions of people on the move with fierce competition for water and land; And floods, droughts and landslides accelerating worldwide.”
To conclude, the Secretary-General said, “I am here today to cry out from the rooftop of the world: stop the madness. The glaciers are retreating, but we cannot. We must end the fossil fuel age. We must act now to protect people on the frontline; and to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, to avert the worst of climate chaos. The world can’t wait.”