The World Sikh News prints a speech by the head of the United Nations, Ban-Ki-Moon. The site tartly notes that “the geo-political and poverty situation of South Asia, except that in Burma, escapes attention and so does the threat to world peace from the political developments in this region.” I’ve snipped the portions about climate change adaptation: This has been a difficult year for all of us. I have called it “the year of multiple crises.” The coming year promises to be no less difficult. Our commitments and good intentions will be tested as never before.…We have coped particularly well with one of the year's most serious challenges. The food crisis no longer dominates news headlines, but it has not gone away. I am pleased at how the UN system has come together to tackle the problem in its fullest dimension: nutrition, agricultural production, trade and social protection. We are well on the way to changing decades-old policies in agriculture and public health -- mainstays of our work in promoting the Millennium Development Goals and protecting those most vulnerable to climate change, poverty and economic crisis.
Further challenges lie immediately before us. 2009 will be the year of climate change. This weekend, I returned from Poznan, Poland, after having attended the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference. We made progress. We agreed to a work plan and had a good exchange of views on a shared vision for long-term cooperation. We agreed to operationalize the Adaptation Fund. All recognized that climate change cannot await a resolution of the economic crisis. Most agreed on the need for what I call a “Green New Deal.”
We have only twelve short months to Copenhagen. We have no time to waste. We must reach a global climate change deal before the end of the year -- one that is balanced, comprehensive and ratifiable by all nations….
The UN Building in New York, shot by Stefan Schulze, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
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