DUSHANBE, September 19, Asia-Plus — Tomorrow, President Emomali Rahmon will depart for New York to attend the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly and the UN Climate Summit, according to presidential press service.
President Rahmon will deliver a statement at the summit on September 22. During his stay in New York, the Tajik leader is also scheduled to hold a number of bilateral meetings.
Some media report that the 64th session that was opened by the UN General Assembly on September 15 is one of the most historic and crucially important sessions in the history of the United Nations. On nuclear disarmament, Ban said he welcomed the “heightened awareness” of the international community after the issue had lain “dormant” for more than a decade, and said he expected the high-level Security Council meeting on September 24 under the chairmanship of US President Obama to “generate strong political momentum to address nuclear issues.
The United Nations General Assembly opened its 64th session with veteran Libyan diplomat Ali Abdussalam Treki at the helm. “The United Nations must be reformed and must gain international legitimacy, ensuring that its voice is heard and respected and its resolutions applied,” Treki told delegates at the opening session, according to China’s Xinhua.
“It is vital to reform the Security Council and to re-reform the General Assembly so that they can comprehensively fulfill their roles,” he said. The GA president”s speech also touched upon other key issues relating to the 192-member body”s work, including counter-terrorism, the Middle East peace process, development, climate change and non-proliferation.
As far as the Climate Summit is concerned, the United Nations has convened a summit on climate change in the hope of opening some way out to the deadlock over the issue of mutual concern. A record number of world leaders, including the US President Barack Obama, are expected to attend the summit.
In the meantime, a senior United Nations adviser has called on world governments to reduce population growth and work together to keep climate change from causing an immense human catastrophe, starkly warning: “We’re on a trajectory that is absolutely unsustainable and profoundly dangerous,” according the UN News Center.
Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Special Adviser to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) said the rich world should pay for much of the necessary mitigating steps. “We’re in the age of this planet where human activity dominates the earth”s processes. Humanity has become so large in absolute number and in economic activity that we have overtaken earth processes in vital ways to the point of changing the climate, the hydrologic cycle,” he told the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva on September 15.
Current international attempts to respond are off track, he said. “We don”t need global negotiations right now as much as we need global brainstorming, global problem solving,” according to Mr. Sachs, who likened the approach to a high-stakes poker game in which negotiators hold their cards close to their chests. “The climate change problem is not a trade negotiation. It is simply the most complex engineering, economic, and social problem humanity has ever faced.”
He called for a massive, coordinated public-private effort with a great deal of input by experts to determine what can be done to allow substantial economic growth to raise living standards for hundreds of millions of poor while coping with environmental problems that already are unsustainable, highlighted by but not limited to climate change.
