UN chief urges ‘rapid’ emission cuts to curb climate change

The head of the United Nations called Thursday for “immediate, rapid and large-scale” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming and avert climate disaster.

Ahead of the annual UN General Assembly meeting next week, Antonio Guterres warned governments that climate change is proceeding faster than predicted and fossil fuel emissions have already bounced back from a pandemic dip.

Speaking at the launch of a UN-backed report summarising current efforts to tackle climate change, Guterres said recent extreme weather — from Hurricane Ida in the United States to floods in western Europe and the deadly heatwave in the Pacific Northwest

— showed no country is safe from climate-related disasters. “These changes are just the beginning of worse to come,” he said, appealing to governments to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord. “Unless there are immediate, rapid and largescale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, we will be unable to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit),” said Guterres.

“The consequences will be catastrophic.”

In their report, titled United in Science 21, six UN bodies and scientific organisations drew on existing research to argue that there is a direct link between human-caused emissions, record high temperatures and disasters that have a tangible impact, including “billions of work hours (...) lost through heat alone.”