United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres visits a climate mitigation project in Bangkok Centenary Park, Thailand. UN photo

In Thailand for the ASEAN Summit, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres visited a climate mitigation project in Bangkok’s new Centenary Park where he told journalists that “coal addiction must be overcome.”

The world’s addiction to coal “remains a major threat in relation to climate change and one of the messages in the summit will be very clearly that countries in these areas that are in one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change,” said Guterres.

The UN chief informed the press of a recently published report saying that climate change was causing ocean levels to rise much faster than previously forecasted.

“According to this new report, unless we are able to… defeat climate change, in 2050, the research has forecasted that 300 million people will be flooded by sea water in the world,” Guterres stated.

He also called climate change “the biggest threat to the planet at the present moment and the defining issue of our time.”

Pledging his commitment to raising global attention on the need “to abide by what scientists tell us is necessary to do,” he argued that “we need to contain the rising temperatures 1.5 degrees until the end of the century” and “to be carbon neutral in 2050 and reduce the emissions by 45 percent in the next decade.”