UN Secretary General’s Climate Resilience Initiative Set To Mobilize And Accelerate Climate Action

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UN Secretary General’s climate resilience initiative set to mobilize and accelerate climate action for sustainable development

Partners of a new UN-led platform to mobilize and accelerate action on climate resilience agreed today to move ahead with plans that will help meet the needs of a growing global population that is being impacted by climate change.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Initiative on Climate Resilience, known as A2R (Anticipate, Absorb, Reshape), was launched by world leaders during the Paris Climate Conference last year.

The A2R Leadership Group comprises Germany, Egypt, Morocco, Samoa, the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Resilience Partnership; Bangladesh based philanthropic Bank BRAC, Insurance Development Forum (IDF), Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Center, Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and UN Environment. The Leadership Group is charged with implementing the transformational vision embedded in the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals through an unprecedented global multistakeholder partnership.

It will catalyze climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts to support people in addressing the challenge of climate change, contributing to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In the past two decades, 4.2 billion people have been affected by weather-related disasters such as floods, droughts and storms, including a significant loss of lives. At the same time, climate change is increasing at an unprecedented pace. Global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent broke numerous records in the first half of 2016. In addition, each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in modern temperature records, which date to 1880.

“We have no time to lose,” Mr. Ban told the Leadership Group. “The global thermostat continues to rise. Each month brings new temperature records and more floods, droughts and extreme weather events. Vulnerability to climate risk continues to increase. This translates to greater humanitarian need and more economic losses.