 My name is Salim al-Haqqa, I'm a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development with the Climate Change Group in London, also Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh. And in this context, most relevantly, I'm a coordinating lead author of Chapter 14, which is on adaptation options in working group two of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC. The IPCC is in the process of bringing out its fifth assessment report over a number of months. The report of working group one, which is on the science of the greenhouse gas emissions and what their status is, is about to be released. The second working group report will come out in March of next year, 2014, and that's on the vulnerability impacts and adaptations. That's the report that I'm one of the coordinating lead of is in. And the third working group report comes out a few months later that looks at the responses to climate change, both mitigation and to some extent also adaptation. And then there's a final report that synthesizes all three, which is called the Synthesis Report. So over the course of the next six to eight months, we will have a series of IPCC fifth assessment reports coming out, the first of which looks at the science. And I'll say a few words about what we can expect, although these are not official on behalf of IPCC until they are finally approved and released. In general, what we are finding is that the science of climate change and particularly the measurement of emissions and concentrations in the atmosphere has gone up. We have passed a critical threshold of 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, which was something that we had hoped to avoid. We still can perhaps with very great effort avoid 450 or 500 parts per million, but anything higher than that is going to be particularly difficult to do unless we take very severe action and catastrophic in terms of consequences of temperatures. We are headed now for a temperature rise of above three degrees, possibly three and a half, possibly even four degrees or higher by the end of the century, unless we take drastic action now. So the message from the working group one is certainly that we have not been able to reduce emissions significantly. We have not been able to stabilize concentrations of the greenhouse gases. They continue to rise. And therefore we are looking at severe impacts of climate change in the medium term. And we have to take very strong actions to reduce our emissions in the longer term if we want to avoid them. I'll say a few things about some of the potential impacts, particularly on least developed countries and in South Asia where I come from. In some of these vulnerable developing countries in the South Asian region as well as in the least developed countries more broadly, the impacts of climate change are already self-evident. Droughts are becoming more severe and more frequent. Flaps are becoming more severe and more frequent. The one in 20 year flood is now on average a one in five year flood in many countries and typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes, depending on whether we are in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean or the Caribbean, are also becoming more intense if not more frequent. And therefore we are seeing the consequences of impacts of severe events more frequently now and therefore are going to have to deal with them. And our ability to adapt is going to have to be improved very, very considerably over time. So if we want to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change. With regard to the emissions of greenhouse gases and the opportunity for reducing them, the fifth assessment report working group one this time gives us a sort of an umbrella or a capacity of how much atmospheric space is still left for us to emit and to fill up and that's been filled up very rapidly. If we want to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change associated with three and a half degrees or four degrees or higher, then we're going to have to within the next decade or two reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases very, very drastically. And this message I think will be the key message from working group one to the political community around the world that we need to redouble our efforts to reduce our emissions if we want to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change.