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Cli­mate En­voy of the Pres­i­dent of the UN Gen­er­al As­sem­bly, Pro­fes­sor Ka­mal Amakrane, says adap­ta­tion must take place at a lo­cal lev­el if the world is to make se­ri­ous progress in tack­ling the chal­lenges of cli­mate change. His state­ment, though not con­nect­ed, came the same week the En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency in the Unit­ed States planned to re­peal its own find­ings that green­house gas­es like car­bon diox­ide and methane are heat­ing the earth and that warm­ing threat­ens pub­lic health and wel­fare. The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s de­ci­sion strikes at the heart of the cli­mate fight.

Amakrane was speak­ing to a group of in­ter­na­tion­al jour­nal­ists in Berlin, Ger­many, at the Cli­mate Peace Se­cu­ri­ty Nexus. The Mo­roc­can said, “It is quite re­gret­table that we are not where the pop­u­la­tion wants us to be. Glob­al cit­i­zens at large ex­pect a set of am­bi­tions, and re­gret­tably, we’re not there.”

Amakrane, who has worked with the UN for 25 years, warned that bu­reau­cra­cy is ham­per­ing the cli­mate process. “We should not be the vic­tim of bu­reau­cra­cy, and I have been a bu­reau­crat. They are good at the process. They think the process is the end, but in fact, the process is not the end. The peo­ple are the end, but if we don’t bring the dig­ni­ty and re­al­i­ty to the process, the so­lu­tion will not en­dure,” he stat­ed.