• Shehbaz Sharif has said the crux of his speech at the UN General Assembly was to warn the world of the threat posed by climate change.
• He said the climate-induced calamity Pakistan was facing would not stay in Pakistan, if no urgent action was taken.
• He said India should reverse post-August 2019 actions and stop the process of demographic change in illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has said the crux of his speech at the UN General Assembly was to warn the world of the threat posed by climate change to humanity.

In his tweets on Saturday, he said the climate-induced calamity Pakistan was facing would not stay in Pakistan, if no urgent action was taken.

He said the global response should not be guided by cameras but empathy and concern for humankind.

Shehbaz Sharif said that he also stated Pakistan’s position on issues critical to our foreign policy and made it clear to the world that Pakistan desired peaceful and good neighbourly relations with India. For this, he said, India should reverse post-August 2019 actions and stop the process of demographic change in illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

Meanwhile, in his address to the 77th session of United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 23, PM Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif has urged the world leaders to come together and “act now” to deal with the issue of climate change.

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He said, “We expect some approximation of justice for the loss and damage by this calamity that has not been triggered by anything we have done.”

The Prime Minister said due to this global challenge, our glaciers are melting fast, our forests are burning, and our heat waves have crossed 53 degree C, making us the hottest place on the planet.

He said during the recent calamity, for 40 days and 40 nights a biblical flood poured down on us, smashing centuries of weather records, challenging everything we knew about disaster, and how to manage it.

The Prime Minister said this calamity has pushed some 11 million people below the poverty line, while others will drift to cramped urban shelters, leaving little room for climate-smart rebuilding.

He said even today, huge swathes of the country are still under-water, submerged in an ocean of human suffering. In this ground zero of climate change, 33 million people, including women and children are now at high risk from health hazards, with 650,000 women giving birth in makeshift tarpaulins.

The Prime Minister said more than 1500 of my people have perished in the great flood, including over 400 children. He said early estimates suggest that more than 13000 kilometres of metaled roads have been damaged, over 370 bridges have been swept away, a million homes have been destroyed and another million damaged.