As world leaders prepare to gather in New York for the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit, the President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Christopher J. Loeak, has issued a powerful call to action on climate change in a video address to the world. Lying on average just two meters (six feet) above sea level, the Marshall Islands is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change. In the last year alone, the atoll nation has endured two national emergencies as a result of unprecedented droughts in its northern islands, and the displacement of more than 1,000 people due to flooding by massive king tides in the nation’s capital, Majuro. During the five minute video address, titled ‘A clarion call from the climate change frontline’, President Loeak stands in front of the sea wall he has built to protect his family home and declares: “for the Marshall Islands and our friends in the Pacific, this is already a full-blown climate emergency”. He says that some of the country’s islands have already completely disappeared under climate-change-induced rising sea levels, as have parts of Buoj where he used to fish as a boy. More than 130 world leaders are expected to attend next week’s UN Climate Summit, which comes just over a year before the deadline for a new global climate treaty, due to be signed in Paris at the end of 2015. During the video President Loeak states: “To my fellow world leaders I say next week’s Summit is a chance […]
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