ANKARA – Turkey‘s leading bus manufacturer Otokar on Monday announced it has recently received an order of 50 compressed natural gas (CNG) city buses from Azerbaijan‘s leading public transportation company Xaliq Faiqoglu.

The buses will be produced in line with the needs of Baku public transportation and deliveries will start this year and are planned to be completed in the first quarter of 2022, according to a statement by the Turkish company.

“We are pleased that our vehicles, which are the first choice in urban public transportation in many European countries, especially in France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Romania, as well as in Turkey, will be available in Azerbaijan shortly,” said Serdar Görgüç, Otokar’s general manager.

Noting that municipalities and bus operators have turned to environmentally friendly vehicles in recent years due to climate change and air pollution, Görgüç said, “We developed Turkey‘s first electric, first hybrid and CNG buses.”

These buses will help the fight against both climate change and air pollution, he added.

NEW YORK, AUG 9: The United Nations panel on climate change told the world on Monday that global warming was dangerously close to being out of control and that humans were “unequivocally” to blame.

Already, greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are high enough to guarantee climate disruption for decades if not centuries, the report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned.

In other words, the deadly heatwaves, gargantuan hurricanes and other weather extremes that are already happening will only become more severe.

Monday alone saw 500,000 acres of forest burning in California, while in Venice tourists waded through ankle-deep water in St Mark’s Square.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the report as a “code red for humanity”.

“The alarm bells are deafening,” he said in a statement. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”

In an interview with Reuters, activist Greta Thunberg called on the public and media to put “massive” pressure on governments to act.

In three months’ time, the UN COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, will try to wring much more ambitious climate action out of the nations of the world, and the money to go with it.

Drawing on more than 14,000 scientific studies, the IPCC report gives the most comprehensive and detailed picture yet of how climate change is altering the natural world — and what could still be ahead.

Unless immediate, rapid and large-scale action is taken to reduce emissions, the report says, the average global temperature is likely to reach or cross the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold within 20 years.

The pledges to cut emissions made so far are nowhere near enough to start reducing the level of greenhouse gases — mostly carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels — accumulated in the atmosphere.

‘Wake-up call’

Governments and campaigners reacted with alarm.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he hoped the report would be “a wake-up call for the world to take action now, before we meet in Glasgow”.

The report says emissions “unequivocally caused by human activities” have already pushed the average global temperature up 1.1°C from its pre-industrial average — and would have raised it 0.5°C further without the tempering effect of pollution in the atmosphere.

That means that, even as societies move away from fossil fuels, temperatures will be pushed up again by the loss of the airborne pollutants that come with them and currently reflect away some of the sun’s heat.

A rise of 1.5°C is generally seen as the most that humanity could cope with without suffering widespread economic and social upheaval.

The 1.1°C warming already recorded has been enough to unleash disastrous weather. This year, heatwaves killed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest and smashed records around the world. Wildfires fuelled by heat and drought are sweeping away entire towns in the US West, releasing record carbon dioxide emissions from Siberian forests, and driving Greeks to flee their homes by ferry.

Further warming could mean that in some places, people could die just from going outside.

“The more we push the climate system … the greater the odds we cross thresholds that we can only poorly project,” said IPCC co-author Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.

Irreversible

Some changes are already “locked in”.

Greenland’s sheet of land-ice is “virtually certain” to continue melting, and raising the sea level, which will continue to rise for centuries to come as the oceans warm and expand.

“We are now committed to some aspects of climate change, some of which are irreversible for hundreds to thousands of years,” said IPCC co-author Tamsin Edwards, a climate scientist at Kings College London.

“But the more we limit warming, the more we can avoid or slow down those changes.”

But even to slow climate change, the report says, the world is running out of time.

If emissions are slashed in the next decade, average temperatures could still be up 1.5°C by 2040 and possibly 1.6°C by 2060 before stabilising.

And if, instead the world continues on its current trajectory, the rise could be 2.0°C by 2060 and 2.7°C by the century’s end.

The Earth has not been that warm since the Pliocene Epoch roughly three million years ago — when humanity’s first ancestors were appearing, and the oceans were 25 metres higher than they are today.

It could get even worse, if warming triggers feedback loops that release even more climate-warming carbon emissions — such as the melting of Arctic permafrost or the dieback of global forests.

ISLAMABAD – /DNA/ – The Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) concluded its 5-day visit to Pakistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) today. The 12-member IPHRC delegation was led by its Chairperson, Dr. Saeed Al Ghufli.

The visit was undertaken in compliance with the mandate provided by the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) to assess the deteriorating human rights situation in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK). The IPHRC – an independent expert body of the OIC – has established a Standing Mechanism for that purpose which regularly monitors and reports on the dismal state of human rights in IIOJK.

During its stay in Pakistan, the IPHRC delegation was received by Prime Minister Imran Khan, Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, and the Minister for Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan Ali Amin Khan Gandapur. The delegation also met the Parliamentary Committee on Kashmir Affairs headed by Mr. Shehryar Afridi as well as Foreign Secretary Sohail Mahmood.

In AJK, the IPHRC delegation called on President Masood Khan and widely interacted with Kashmiri refugees from IIOJK, leadership of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), Kashmiri civil society and media representatives. The IPHRC delegation also visited the Line of Control (LoC) and met with the victims of ceasefire violations carried out by Indian security forces.

The aim of these extensive and wide-ranging interactions was to assess the human rights and humanitarian situation in IIOJK, and to investigate and report on the human rights abuses by the Indian security forces in the occupied territory with a view to making recommendations for the promotion and protection of Kashmiris’ basic civil, political, social, economic, religious and cultural rights including their inalienable right to self-determination, guaranteed by numerous resolutions of the UN Security Council.

The IPHRC delegation also witnessed the human impact of the indiscriminate shelling carried out by Indian security forces across the LoC which results in the precious loss of lives, injuries to civilians including women and children, and damage to civilian property and infrastructure in AJK.

The visiting delegation was provided unfettered access by the Government of Pakistan to undertake its mandated task with objectivity. In due course, a detailed report of the findings of IPHRC will be presented, with concrete recommendations, for the consideration of the next (48th) session of the OIC-CFM.

Several requests have been made by the IPHRC to India over the years for allowing a fact-finding mission to IIOJK. However, despite its false claims of “normalcy” in the occupied territory, India continues to deny access to the IPHRC as well as other human rights organizations to visit IIOJK. An IPHRC delegation had earlier visited Pakistan and AJK in March 2017, and issued a detailed report which documented the gross and systematic violations of human rights by Indian security forces in IIOJK.

The second visit of the IPHRC to Pakistan and AJK, from 4-9 August 2021, coincided with the completion of two years of illegal and unilateral steps imposed by India in IIOJK which were accompanied by draconian measures to enforce an inhuman military siege of the occupied territory, followed by unlawful changes to its demographic structure aimed at robbing Kashmiri Muslims of their majority and distinct identity.

Pakistan welcomes the IPHRC’s efforts for bringing to the attention of the international community the plight of Kashmiris enduring gross, systematic and widespread human rights abuses in IIOJK.

ISLAMABAD, AUG 9 /DNA/ – At the invitation of Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Iraq Dr. Fuad Hussein is undertaking a bilateral visit to Pakistan on 11-12 August 2021.

During the visit, the two Foreign Ministers will hold in-depth exchange of views on all aspects of bilateral relations. They will also review close cooperation in multilateral organizations, in particular the United Nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The Foreign Ministers will also consult on issues concerning the Muslim Ummah as well as on key regional and international issues.

The Iraqi Foreign Minister will also call on the Pakistani leadership and have meetings with other dignitaries.

Pakistan and Iraq have close fraternal ties, founded on strong affinities of faith and culture. Pakistan accords high importance to these relations and is resolved to further deepen and broaden mutual cooperation in diverse fields. The relationship is reinforced by similarity of views on a range of regional and global issues.

The visit of Iraqi Foreign Minister comes in the backdrop of a number of Ministerial-level visits from both sides in the past few months, which signify the importance accorded by the two countries to augmenting the bilateral relationship. Foreign Minister Qureshi visited Iraq in May 2021. Further high-level exchanges are envisaged in the coming months.

The visit of Foreign Minister Dr. Fuad Hussein is expected to add further momentum to the positive trajectory of brotherly relations between Pakistan and Iraq.