Noting the ever-increasing impact of extreme weather events, top United Nations officials, including Secretary-General António Guterres and Miroslav Lajčák, the President of the General Assembly have urged efforts to boost resilience and strengthen damage mitigation measures.
The Earth’s protective ozone layer is well on track to recovery thanks to a highly successful environmental agreement which marks it 30th anniversary on 16 September.
The Montreal Protocol on Substance which Deplete the Ozone Layer achieved a near 99 per cent phase-out of ozone destroying substances like chlorofluorocabons (CFCs) which were once commonly used in products ranging like refrigerants and aerosols.
Managed for most of its life by monks and operated today by MeteoSwiss, the meteorological station at Grand-St-Bernard, located high in the Swiss Alps near the border with Italy, is today celebrating 200 years of uninterrupted meteorological observation.
During the ceremony, the World Meteorological Organization presented the station with a certificate and a commemorative metal plate designating it as a Centennial Observing Station. The ceremony was attended by representatives of WMO, MeteoSwiss, the Observatory of Geneva, the canton of Valais, and members of the local monastery.
Hurricane Irma caused devastation in low-lying Caribbean islands, made landfall in Cuba as the first category 5 hurricane since 1924 and made landfall again in Florida, USA, on 10 September as a very dangerous category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson windscale.
The US National Weather Service and US National Hurricane Center warned of life-threatening storm surge, floods, tropical storm force winds, torrential rain and tornadoes as large parts of Florida were paralysed by the storm.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has agreed the outline of its next comprehensive scientific assessment of climate change, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
At a Session of the Panel in Montreal, Canada, the IPCC agreed the outlines of the three working group contributions to AR6, which will all be delivered in 2021. The next step for the IPCC is to invite nominations through Governments and observers organizations for authors from among the international research community, who will prepare the report.
