Collective effort needed to ensure implementation of Paris treaty

WORLD leaders are making final preparations for the annual UN climate summit which starts in Spain next week. The meeting comes after a year in which global warming has risen rapidly in the public consciousness with "climate emergency" recently declared as the words of 2019 by Oxford Dictionaries following a massive increase in their usage.

The upcoming summit is therefore as urgent as it is important on the fourth anniversary of the landmark Paris conference. For while there is growing international recognition that climate change is perhaps the biggest facing humanity in the twenty first century, much more action is needed.

This was underlined only last week with a hard-hitting report by the United Nations which showed that the world is on track to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas as can be burned by 2030 while restricting rise in the global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latter is the uppermost limit scientists say is necessary to prevent dangerous or "runaway" climate change.