UN official warns of costly effects of climate-change
Failure in the battle to restrain global climate change will entail more costly and devastating impact than any effort to transition off fossil fuels, the head of United Nations Environment Programme warned Sunday.
UNEP executive director Erik Solheim is in Canada to mark World Environment Day on Monday in an event in Niagara Falls, Ont., with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He arrived just days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would pull the United States out of the Paris agreement because, the President said, it would result in the loss of American jobs.
Mr. Solheim said the world is already seeing costly effects of a changing climate – from flooding to drought in some of the world’s poorest countries such as Somalia. And that impact will intensify and reach catastrophic levels if the world does not work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, he said in a telephone interview from Toronto.
CIFOR