Officials urge action on climate change

Officials called for urgent actions to be taken regarding climate change during a sub-forum of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2023 on Wednesday.

The forum began on Tuesday and will conclude on Friday in Boao, Hainan province.

Ban Ki-moon, former secretary-general of the United Nations, told the forum that global issues such as COVID-19, inflation and recession are not as important or as serious as climate change. He added that people have lost sight of the significance of the problem.

"The window to take climate action is closing fast. Progress on the ground is slow and limited, and the global emissions gap is wide," Ban said.

The world needs to pay more attention to the long-term impact of climate change, he said.

"We have to focus on the bigger picture and this much larger crisis. We need to cut fossil fuel production by 6 percent annually between 2020 and 2030, but instead we are seeing a global rise of 2 percent being planned," he said.

The UN estimates that by 2030, as many as 700 million people will be displaced from their homes due to drought. By 2040, about one in four children will live in areas with extreme water shortages.

China is vulnerable to climate change, said Zheng Guoguang, secretary-general of the National Disaster Reduction Commission.

Last year, the Yangtze River basin suffered from record-breaking high temperatures and dry weather over the past 60 years. More than half the nation's natural disasters during that period were caused by weather, he said.

"We have formed reaction plans. So far, more than 5 million emergency plans have been arranged at the national, provincial, city and county levels to prevent deaths and injuries caused by natural disasters. For example, we can safely evacuate more than 700,000 people during a typhoon," Zheng said.