Climate Action 2017-2018

POLICY
Robert Glasser, UN Secretary-
General’s Special Representative for
Disaster Risk Reduction and Head
of the UN Office for Disaster Risk
Reduction (UNISDR)
This year there has been
an accumulation of evidence to
support the claim that 90 per cent
of disasters now are weather and
climate related.
Credit: Logan Abassi, UN Photo/Flickr
Anyone who followed the recent
visit of the UN Secretary-General,
António Guterres, to the Caribbean
islands of Barbuda and Dominica can
have no doubts about the existential threat
that extreme weather events pose for
small islands battling the eff ects of climate
change. Mr Guterres is much travelled
and has seen many disasters, but he
commented that he had never seen such
‘a high level of devastation’ as the one that
he witnessed in Barbuda after the passage
of Hurricane Irma, which rendered the
island uninhabitable. Days later, Hurricane
Maria ripped off roofs and stripped the
leaves from the trees in Dominica’s rain
forest which is central to the island’s
tourism industry and status as a UNESCO
World Heritage site.
Following those visits, the Secretary-
General made a stark pronouncement:
“The link between climate change and
the devastation we are witnessing is clear,
and there is a collective responsibility of
the international community to stop this
suicidal development.” This year there
has been an accumulation of evidence
to support the claim that 90 per cent of
disasters now are weather and climate
related.
Over the last 18 months, 20 countries
have declared drought emergencies,
notably across the Horn of Africa where
hunger is forcing people off the land in
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