UN chief calls for concrete action plans at UN Climate Summit

UNITED NATIONS, March 28 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday called on world leaders to come to New York in September with concrete action plans against global warming for a UN Climate Summit.

Guterres himself called for the summit scheduled for Sept. 23, a day before the start of the annual high-level week of the UN General Assembly, to crank up political will on climate change.

"It is important that we tackle climate change with much greater ambition. I am telling leaders: Don't come with a speech, come with a plan," Guterres told a news conference for the laUNch of an annual report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

"I am calling on them to come to the summit with concrete, realistic plans to put us on a sustainable path, once and for all."

That means enhancing national contributions UNder the Paris Agreement by 2020 and showing how the world can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent over the next decade and get to net zero emissions globally by 2050, said Guterres.

Without doing so, global warming will be irreversible, he said. "We are very close to the moment in which it will no longer be possible to come to the end of the century with only 1.5 degrees (of temperature increase above pre-industrial levels)."

The WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate 2018 states that 2018 was the fourth warmest year on record and that 2015-2018 were the four warmest years on record. Average global temperature reached about 1 degree Celcius above pre-industrial levels. Enditem