by Theleaders-Online | September 28, 2019 3:52 am
NEW YORK: Malaysian prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said the international community should be paying attention to climate change and accompanying natural disasters, instead of preparing for war.
“We should be preparing to combat climate change, to bring back the normal environment we had been used to over the last thousands of years,” he said.
In his statement at the General Debate of the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, Mahathir said countries should also be preparing for earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, floods and landslides.
“We should learn how to mitigate these natural disasters. We should be constructing shelters, make rain and grow food without sunlight, evacuate the sea side etc. etc.,” he said.
The Malaysian leader stressed that teams of well-equipped disaster experts should be at the ready to rush to disaster areas, underscoring that every disaster is a world disaster.
“All these natural disasters may not happen of course. But we cannot rely on that. We are wasting our money preparing for wars, inventing ever more destructive weapons when all of us may be wiped out by natural disasters as the planet goes through its next cycle,” he said.
He said human beings are clever and can still survive the next cycle if they set researchers to come up with proper defence against natural catastrophes.
“If we reduce our budget for killing people, we will have the funds for research and preparation,” he said.
Bernama
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