Séance du jeudi 28 janvier 2021 à 17h
2^e législature - 3^e année - 8^e session - 47^e séance

Le président. Mesdames et Messieurs les députés, avant d'aborder les différents points de notre ordre du jour, j'ai le plaisir de donner la parole à M. Petteri Taalas, secrétaire général de l'Organisation météorologique mondiale, pour quelques mots de bienvenue en anglais à l'occasion de notre première séance dans la salle Obasi de l'OMM, salle que nous fréquenterons jusqu'à fin octobre 2021. Monsieur le secrétaire général, vous avez la parole.

M. Petteri Taalas, secrétaire général de l'Organisation météorologique mondiale. Thank you. Dear Grand Conseil participants, it is a pleasure to address you. We are very proud, from the WMO side, that we can host you here, and I hope that despite these unusual times you are feeling well. You are brave to attend such meetings.

I would like to tell you briefly what my organization does. I am sorry, my French is a little bit limited, so I hope that you will cope with my English. WMO is the United Nations specialized agency in weather, water and climate, in charge of the global observing system: we have satellites, balloons, ground-based and aircraft-based observations, and we are taking care of the free exchange of global data, which is the backbone of any weather forecasting business worldwide. We are running thirteen centers, some of them providing services for the global population. Here, European countries have a joint center that is also providing long-term forecast for Switzerland and all the other European countries. So if you complain about the quality of the forecast, it is the European center that is in charge of that. Météo-France has its office in this building and they are providing services for the Suisse romande here.

We are the nucleus of climate science, and here are some examples of our climate products. We know that so far we have been reaching 1.2 degree warming globally and we are breaking records in main greenhouse gases. Here is an example of carbon dioxide, whose concentration has been growing year by year. And we have been warming especially Europe: Europe had the warmest year ever last year; with the dark colors, you can see it even better. What may also interest you is that all the glaciers worldwide are melting, which means that major rivers are getting less and less water. That is also a challenge here in Switzerland. We are providing several science reports on an annual basis to describe what is happening to the climate.

Our less developed country members do not have proper early warning services; we have a program to improve their performance. Switzerland has been one of the important donors behind this work. We can build better early warning services for less developed countries, so that they can save human lives and we can avoid economic losses.

We are the second oldest United Nations agency: we were established already in 1873, and in that founding meeting there was not a single woman, so I am happy to see that there are more women in this audience. Our work is very much done by our members, we have more than two hundred thousand experts at the national level. We are also hosting IPCC, which is providing science reports; their secretariat is working in this building. This real-time data exchange is our core business. Weather forecasting would not be possible without our AWS, would not be possible without us: the main support of the climate science is coming from our community. This data and know-how sharing is our everyday business. Here you can see several sectors which are benefiting from our expertise. In developing countries, for example, agriculture is very important.

The World Economic Forum has just taken place this week, and they have been listing the major risks to the global economy this year. You can see the likelihood of various risks: extreme weather events and failure of climate action are among the highest risks. When it comes to impact, of course, the ongoing pandemic is the highest, but again, climate action failure is already number two. Climate and extreme weather events have been on the top of the World Economic Forum risks for the past four years.

We have just carried out a major reform of WMO's constituent bodies and secretariat, and for example we have opened the doors to private sectors: we are now growing among the private sector service providers, and they are becoming part of our work.

Finally, I would like to show you some climate-related slides we published two years ago - the IPCC 1.5 degree Report - to demonstrate that it is still possible to even try to reach 1.5 degree globally. Recently we have heard the European Union and China, last night also the USA, Japan and South Korea, saying that they would like to aim at becoming global neutral by 2050 or 2060. That means that we would reach a target between 1.5 and 2 degrees. So far we have not done enough to reach those targets. And this is the problem: at the moment, 85% of the global energy, including transport sector energy, is based on fossil energy - coal, oil and gas - and only 15% is based on nuclear, hydro and renewable energy. We should reverse those numbers during the coming decades to be successful with climate mitigation.

This goal also has an impact on us as a UN agency and on many other agencies. In the future we will very much favor videoconferences. Our guess is that we will only organize one-third of our meetings physically in the future, and that may have an impact on Geneva in general: how much hotel capacity and meeting capacity will we meet in the future ? The teleworking we have been carrying out recently is going to be part of our practice. That means that in the future, we may need less office space. Those things may have an impact on the economy of this region.

In general we are proud of WMO and we think that we are one of the dynamic players in the UN family. With these words, thank you for the opportunity to address you. I wish you very successful meetings here. Thank you. (Applaudissements.)

Présentation de M. Petteri Taalas, secrétaire général de l'OMM