Datuk Seri Ang Lai Soon
KUCHING: When US president Joe Biden invited 40 countries to a global virtual summit on climate change on Thursday to coincide with Earth Day this year, Malaysia was overlooked and excluded.
For social activist Datuk Seri Ang Lai Soon, he regarded the move of leaving out Malaysia in any global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emission was obviously ‘a mistake’.
He pointed out that Malaysia had always been in the climate-change news every year for the wrong reasons such as the thick smog that would blanket most parts of the country over a period of several months – causing the people to become ill and the economy to suffer.
Ang said now with the Covid19 pandemic, the whole situation would totally be untenable if the haze were to recur this year.
He pointed out that Malaysia was among the countries most affected by climate change, with the present unbearable hot weather ‘giving us an early warning’.
“Something must be done now and we cannot afford to take things for granted. This is an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet from humanity-created climate change.
“Be prepared and don’t wait till the 11th hour as the price of dithering on the combatting climate change is just too much to pay,” said Ang in a statement.
He also cautioned that just as no country would be safe until every country was safe from the pandemic, the same was true with climate change.
“Our daily lives generally consume all our energies and current events continuously relayed by 24/7 modern news media occupy much of our interest.
“But, as a few random statistics clearly indicate, there is an urgent need to take positive action on reconciling our ever-growing demands with the finite resources of our planet,” he said.
Scientists suggested that the resulting pressure on the planet’s finite resources was being manifested in rising global temperatures, already creating very uncertain worldwide weather patterns and changes in the climate with global effect on sea levels and agriculture.
“This is, of course, an over-simplification, but it does serve to show that climate change made by human activities is a problem that we cannot ignore.
“There are no simple short-term fixes and the time scale of positive action showing positive results is measured in decades, not years,” stressed Ang.
The United Nations (UN) had recognised this, having held its first annual UN Conference on Climate Change in Berlin in 1995.
At the 2016 Conference, the president of the UN General Assembly called for the global economy in all sectors to be transformed to achieve a low-emission global economy.
Nonetheless, little positive action had been taken since, observed Ang.
Touching on Earth Day, he highlighted the urgent and potentially-irreversible threat to human societies and the planet from humanity-created climate change.
“Our collective attention, ingenuity, and resources on a global scale are needed now to stabilise and reverse present trends of rising global temperatures changes.”
Ang also lauded the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Malaysia for its ‘splendid efforts in tackling climate change over the years’.
“Let us all do our part to help solve what is undeniably the most serious universal long-term problem we have to face – the greenhouse gas emissions and how to cut it down,” he added.
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