"This urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet from humanity-created climate change."

By Ang Lai Soon

After four years in the wilderness, the United States, one of the world's greatest polluters, is today hosting the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate Change.

Its new president has gathered some 40 nations, big and small, to this summit.

Surprisingly, Malaysia is not included nor invited, though every year this country is in the news for the wrong reason.

For a few months almost annually, thick smog/haze would blanket almost the whole country with the people taken ill and the economy suffering, in fact in the Asean region as well.

Now with COVID-19, the whole situation will be totally untenable if the haze/smog is here as well.

The present unbearable hot weather is giving us an early warning. Do something now and do not take things for granted.

Be prepared. Don't wait until the eleventh hour as the price for being disorganized is just too much to pay.

With COVID-19, no country is safe until every country is safe. The same is true with environment.

To leave out an important country like Malaysia in any global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to contain the highly contagious virus is obviously a mistake.

We all live on a rather well-endowed planet evolved over eons in a particular place in the universe that enabled life as we know it to evolve, to which homo sapiens owes its existence.

Although our detailed knowledge of the universe is minuscule, this is the only known planet that supports life.

Our everyday 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 actions on reconciling our ever-growing demands with the finite resources of our planet.

Scientists suggest that the resulting pressure on the planet's finite resources is being manifested in rising global temperatures, already creating very uncertain worldwide weather patterns and changes in the climate with worldwide effects on sea levels and current agriculture.

This is, of course, an oversimplification but serves to show that climate change made by human activity is a problem that we cannot ignore.

There are no simple short-term fixes and the time scale of positive actions showing positive results is measured in decades, not years.

The United Nations recognize 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. In short, to date little positive action has been taken.

Earth Day today draws our attention to this 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 is needed now to stability and reverse present trends of rising global temperatures changes.

The World Wide Fund for Nature Malaysia is to be congratulated over the years for its splendid efforts in tackling climate change.

Let us all, without exception, do our part to help solve what is undeniably the most serious universal long-term problem we have to face: to cut down greenhouse gas emissions.

(Datuk Seri Ang Lai Soon is Sarawak social activist, philanthropist, founder of St John's Ambulance Sarawak.)