Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan officially set in motion his new humanitarian forum here on Wednesday by exhorting all nations to work together to meet the challenges of climate change.
Annan said that the Global Humanitarian Forum will work with governments and civil society to address the humanitarian impact of climate change on the poor and most vulnerable.
He told journalists:
We are all in the same boat and we need to come together to resolve it.
The former UN chief added that climate change and resultant lack of resources is already fuelling conflict and migration patterns across the globe and this is only set to continue in the years ahead.
This point was emphasised by the former UN coordinator for emergency affairs, Jan Egeland, who said that five to seven times more people now lose their livelihoods from natural disasters linked to climate change than they do from conflict.
He warned:
The world is waking up to something very threatening but we’re not acting really, there’s no investment in this as of yet.
Egeland is board member of the Forum and now heads the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.
Egeland further said that he hoped the new body will challenge decision makers to do more.
Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change informed that the forum will take a two-pronged approach and consider how to mitigate and adapt to the impact of climate change.
Highlighting the gravity of the issue, Pachauri, who is also a board member of the new forum, pointed out that impacts of climate change will continue for a long time even if we were to stabilise the concentration of greenhouse gases.
The Global Humanitarian Forum has been set up with Swiss government funding and aims to narrow the gap in international disaster relief and prevention by bringing together governments, aid agencies, the military, the business world and academics.
Annan said that the Forum will now start working at coordination of these different groups, terminating in its first annual high-level meeting in June 2008.
Image: unep
