UN confab key to coping with ‘catastrophic’ climate change

Mushahidullah Khan urges global leaders to agree to a viable sustainable plan to protect the world

ISLAMABAD: Minister for Climate Change Mushahidullah Khan on Sunday urged global leaders, heading to the German city of Bonn next month for the 23rd annual UN Climate Change Conference (COP 23), to agree to a viable sustainable plan for mobilisation of financial, knowledge and technological resources to protect the world from increasingly devastating fallouts of human-caused climate change.

“The common global menace of climate change, which has put the sustainability of the planet earth at risk, cannot be tackled, if we the world’s political leaders continue to remain at loggerheads over questions of responsibility to address the exacerbating menace to our lives and livelihoods,” Mushahidullah  said while speaking to the media on Sunday.

“We have no option but to join our hands together to boost the world’s resilience against adverse climate change impacts, particularly floods, heat waves, sea-level rise, cyclones and hurricanes,” he warned.

The climate change minister for a country which is among the top 10 countries suffering from fast changing climatic conditions, said that global climate action calls upon global leaders to commit through political wills, respectively, to make the world climate-safe, sustainable  and inhabitable with adequate resources available for the present and future generations to live their healthy lives without draining natural resources callously.

“We must take climate action today to mitigate the climate risk to the world by bringing together businesses, governments and public bodies to accelerate sustainable development, advance the green economy and promote the use of natural resources with sanity,” he stressed.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 30^th, 2017.