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COP28 director general calls for tackling climate change problem seriously

It impacts people all around the globe, Majid Al Suwaidi said

ABU DHABI, September 10. /TASS/. Director-General and Special Representative of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) Majid Al Suwaidi has called for tackling the problem of climate change utterly seriously as it impacts people all around the globe.

"We all suffer from climate [change] around the world," he told journalists answering a TASS question. "We're interested in hosting a COP because we're a country that lives in a hot environment, we live in an arid environment, we live in a region that is impacted by climate change."

"When you talk about water scarcity, if you talk about food, you know, we are dependent on the global community," he noted.

He recalled the recent flooding in Pakistan that claimed the lives of at least 150 people, the wildfires in Europe, North America, on the Hawaii Maui Island, as well as refugees in Africa who had to flee their homes because of the draught and called for focusing on helping the most vulnerable categories.

"I think that it's important for us to recognize that all of us are being impacted by climate change today and that a world with temperature rise above 1.5 degrees is really a world that none of us wants to live in. And that's why we all have to take this very seriously," he emphasized.

The 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) will be held in Dubai from November 30 through December 12.

After the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015 in Paris, 193 United Nations member countries, as well as Palestine, Niue, the Cook Islands and the European Union, supported the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Its goals are to prevent the global average annual temperature on the planet from exceeding more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 and to keep the warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius. Scientists believe that the warming higher than that will entail irreversible consequences for the environment. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the average air temperature in 2022 was by 1.5 degrees higher that the average annual temperatures in 1850-1900.