"Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish."

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, officially opened the Egypt Climate Summit (COP27) this morning with a new call to the almost 200 countries participating in the Sharm el Sheikh meeting to increase their commitments to reduce emissions and the money allocated to the fight against the climate.

He has demanded Guterres "international solidarity that respects human rights" and "social justice", especially to developed countries, "which must lead the way".

"To avoid that terrible fate, all G20 countries must now accelerate their transition this decade," he stressed.

"Human activity is the cause of the problem and human action must be the solution", stressed Guterres, who stressed that "the science is clear and any hope of limiting the increase in temperature to 1.5 degrees implies achieving the net zero emissions by 2050".

"We are dangerously approaching the point of no return

", he warned in his speech before more than 120 heads of government, including the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, who has gone to Egypt together with the third vice president and minister to the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, and who, among other events, will participate this afternoon in the launch of the International Alliance for Resilience to Droughts.

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For Guterres, "the good news is that we know what we have to do and we have the financial and technological tools to achieve it."

The head of the UN has asked the countries to reach "a historic pact between developed countries and emerging economies, a Climate Solidarity Pact" and "China and the US have greater responsibility to make this pact a reality."

This agreement would mean that the richest countries and international financial institutions would offer economic and technical assistance to help emerging economies accelerate their own energy transition towards renewables." This agreement, he added, must allow the end of the use of fuels fossil fuels and coal plants for OECD countries in 2030 and the rest of the world in 2030.

For this reason, he has also asked not to divert attention from climate change and not leave it relegated to other issues: "The war in Ukraine, the conflict in the Sahel, the violence in many other places are terrible crises, but

climate change is on a different, it is the defining issue of our area and the main challenge of our century

," said the UN Secretary General.

The head of the UN has recalled that "in a few days humanity will reach 8,000 million inhabitants."

"The fight against climate change will be won or lost in these decades. Let's win for those 8,000 million citizens and for future generations", he concluded


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