UN General Assembly
2005

Progress in that area is more urgently needed than ever. I therefore encourage every United Nations Member State to act responsibly and in good faith in the pursuit of those goals. Since the previous session of the General Assembly a year ago, the world has experienced natural disasters of an unprecedented scale of destruction. We have just had Hurricane Katrina, and are still getting over the terrible tsunami last year in South-East Asia. The hard lessons of those crises must be learned in order to prepare for future emergencies. While there is nothing we can do to prevent earthquakes and tsunamis, scientists have warned us for years that our continued dependence on and increasing consumption of fossil fuels is generating greenhouse gas emissions that are causing disruptive climate changes. Unless we diversify our sources of energy, we can expect to see more devastating hurricanes and floods in some parts of the world, along with drought and desertification in others. The challenges that our nations face are formidable, and we will be able to overcome them only