UN Chief to Convene "No Nonsense" Climate Summit to Avert Disaster

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS (IDN) — UN Secretary-General António Guterres has never ceased to warn about the impending hazards of climate change worldwide. “We are on a fast track to climate disaster,” he has predicted rather ominously and pointed out that some of the world’s major cities are under water.

“There are unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms and widespread water shortages. And the extinction of a million species of plants and animals.”

“This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies,” he said early this year.

“We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5°C limit agreed in Paris,” he said last week.

“Some Government and business leaders are saying one thing but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic. This is a climate emergency,” he warned.[…]

Concern about smallholder farmers

Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute, an independent policy think tank based in California, told IDN: “The UNSG is right in his role to push world leaders for decisive action to address the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, reject greenwashing and false solutions.”

However, he said, one should be seriously concerned by his statement calling to produce and trade more fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and for more food deliveries to countries in the Global South.

“Hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers reject this disastrous model that entrenches dependency and environmental destruction. Experts from the IPCC have made crystal clear that the world must radically shift the way we produce and trade our food.”

“Calling for more products of industrial agriculture to be shipped to the Global South will further worsen the crisis, whereas we are wasting time to ensure a real transition to a green economy, based on agroecology, diversification, and localized food systems,” Mousseau said.