Climate change is the ultimate nexus issue.
It's impacted by a full range of issues
and, in turn, it impacts just about everything.
While working at the United Nations on climate change,
not a day went by when I didn't engage with security actors,
humanitarian actors, human rights actors.
Think of air pollution,
and the countries and the cities that are struggling with air pollution.
If you can address climate change, the impacts of,
on particulate matter, and on a population's daily life changes directly.
But less clear for many people around
the world are the links to issues that seem far away.
Sea level rise, and yet tens of millions of people
live on shorelines that are affected by climate change today,
and it'll be even more affected tomorrow.
And that is even before varied weather impacts those populations directly.
One of the areas that is probably least understood,
but is increasingly clear is that climate
change is affecting our security environment.
If we seek a more peaceful and secure world,
we have to address climate change.
Currently, today, in the Middle East,
conflict is fueled by climate change.
In Africa, the same is true in Central Asia.
This is only a taste of things to come for virtually every region in the world.
So climate change is a nexus issue that is impacted by this range of other issues,
but addressing climate change will help us to address all those other concerns.
Global warming or rather climate change,
which in fact is not just about the warming,
but the variability of the weather is impacting people all over the world today.
It is increasing with every passing year as we pass through new records of heat,
new records of cold,
new records of weather variability.
The role of human activity is central,
and this has been one of the key conclusions of all the world's scientists,
working together through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It has been conclusively established
that human activity is the main cause of climate change.
The days of debate over whether or not humans were causing climate change is over.
Every serious scientist in the world has signed on to
the proposition that human activity is affecting our climate,
and therefore, the only way to have solutions
is for humans to change their activity.
I wish that the future was really 50 years from now,
or even 30 years from now.
The impacts of global warming
and of climate change are immediate,
but they will grow with time.
For every year that we don't address the climate challenge,
the impacts will be greater
and will cost more to remedy in the future.
Increasingly, we will see food scarcity in
different parts of the world as the rains change
and especially agriculture dependent economies will suffer.
Africa is a continent of great concern.
What could be a breadbasket for the world could become
a source of great problems in terms of producing enough food,
but we're also looking at serious water scarcity.
Every major river system is fed by glacial melt around the globe.
As the glaciers are melting today,
we're seeing increased flooding,
but that flooding will turn to drought,
and scarcity of water within a matter of years in some places
and decades in other.
In a place like Peru in South America,
that depends on glacial melt,
a city of Lima,
Peru of over 10 million people is in a desert.
When the water stop flowing down from the Andes,
what will those people,
those 10 million people in one national capital do for their water source?
2030 is one of the milestones for measuring climate change,
but also for measuring the actions to combat climate change.
It's just far enough out that we could see the types of
transitions in our economies really come to fruition
and make a full impact on the global climate system.
But some of the impacts that we already know,
that we're already locked into are sea level rise.
A lot of low lying populations,
whether it's from Bangladesh to London to Shanghai to Miami in the United States,
are currently impacted, but by 2030,
we will see parts of those cities that will be unusable in their current form.
Also, by 2030, we will see direct impacts on our food systems
and on our water provision.
The competition for scarce water is already driving security dynamics in Central Asia
and in the Middle East.
Today, people look at the conflict in Syria,
and they see a competition,
they see geopolitical forces,
but what is often ignored is
the fundamental underpinning of the extended drought which caused people to
move in Syria that started the chain of
events that led to the humanitarian disaster that we now see.
By 2030, we could expect to see similar dynamics in places
that today are peaceful while there is enough water and enough food,
but when we start to run short,
who knows how many of those places may look like Syria today?
The Kyoto Protocol was
the first international legal instrument that
sought to directly curtail greenhouse gases
and increase countries' resilience to climate change.
It was a first attempt by the global community
to have legal limits on greenhouse gases.
The challenge that Kyoto Protocol faced was that not all nations had signed on.
Large developing countries were exempted from many of the provisions,
and large developed countries like the United States chose not to sign on.
So, the Kyoto protocol,
while it created many instruments for addressing
climate change, financial instruments,
negotiated systems for dealing with climate change,
what it could not do was achieve the universality
necessary to address the full scope of the problem.
Ban Ki-moonDistinguished Chair Professor
