General Assembly President urges cooperation to offset effects of climate change

The President of the United Nations General Assembly has urged global meteorological experts to pool their specialized skills and technical know-how to help offset the alarming effects of climate change which, if left unchecked, will undoubtedly have catastrophic environmental, economic and social repercussions.

"There is the need to find strategies regarding promising ways of reducing carbon dioxide and other damaging emissions and to develop and adopt renewable energy sources," Jan Kavan of the Czech Republic said yesterday in a message to mark World Meteorological Day, which is observed on 23 March. "We all know that this issue cannot be left indefinitely blowing in the wind."

World Meteorological Day is an annual commemoration of the 1950 entry into force of the Convention of the World Meteorological Organization, which set up the Geneva-based UN agency for coordinating and providing a framework for global cooperation in meteorology and related fields of environmental concern, such as hydrology and geophysics.

"International collaboration to manage the damaging emissions of greenhouse gases on our planet will be essential in tackling the question of how our future climate will evolve," Mr. Kavan said, adding that although the different aspects of global climate change are questioned and debated at all levels, "there is, without any doubt, evidence that the acceleration in climate change patterns is attributable to human activity."