Dark skies: Optimism hasn’t been the dominant sentiment among the world’s leaders at this year’s UN General Assembly, anthonyted reports.
FILE - In this May 17, 2019 file photo, Smog blankets the sky in Mexico City. Both lower schools and universities were closed for a third straight day for the pollution alert triggered by smoke from ongoing brush fires combined with the lack of rain.
There are those mornings when you come into work and everyone seems cranky. That’s how it felt at the United Nations this past week during the annual gathering of world leaders. Speech after gloomy speech by leaders from all corners of the planet pointed toward one bleaker-than-thou conclusion: Humanity clearly needs a spa day.
“We are living in times when the magnitude and number of lasting crises is constantly increasing,” said Igor Dodon, Moldova’s president. “We have had enough wars. We don’t want new wars,” said Iraqi President Barham Salih, who would certainly know. And from Roch Marc Christian Kabore, president of Burkina Faso, came this understatement: “International news has been marked by tension.”
Climate change was a central part of that. A U.N. decision to really place the topic front and center produced both a youth climate summit and a full-on event the day before leaders’ addresses started. Many nations answered the call to sound an alarm potent enough to get collectively noticed. Yet is this all that different from before? There have been many moments during the United Nations’ 74-year history when we’ve been on the brink with politics, brinkmanship, displaced people, epidemics, possible nuclear war. Chaos has always reigned, right?
As is tradition with the U.N., leaders did bring solutions to propose, from the thematic to highly specific . Perhaps the most common was a renewed call for a full-throated embrace of multilateralism, which many nations — particularly smaller ones with less global oomph — see as their only salvation.
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