Climate-vulnerable nations urge immediate action at UN Cop31 summit

Urgent action is needed to help countries hardest-hit by the effects of climate change, small island leaders said on Thursday at the United Nations climate talks in Turkey, describing global warming as a life-or-death issue for their people.

“It is time to move past the talking,” said Alix Sebastien Pillay, vice-president of Seychelles, who said the survival of his country, a 115-island archipelago in the Indian Ocean, is at stake. “For Seychelles, climate action is not simply an environmental priority.”

Pillay spoke on the second day of the leaders’ summit at the UN climate conference, where governments are trying to reach consensus on how to address climate change and help countries at greatest risk.

While the entire globe is threatened by souped-up storms, hotter heatwaves, worsening droughts and bigger floods, island nations are among the hardest hit by climate change as they also have to deal with rising seas swallowing their land.

Pillay said Seychelles is experiencing millions of dollars of damage despite contributing little to global warming, and said a UN fund created for compensating vulnerable nations must be urgently strengthened.

“Climate recovery must not come at the expense of our development or push vulnerable nations further into unsustainable debt,” he said.

Report says world has failed to slow warming trends

A report released on Thursday offered a grim assessment: progress in slowing global warming has essentially stalled for the past five years because any steps forward were cancelled out by inaction elsewhere.

The first five years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world did so much that it trimmed an entire degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) from warming projections, but nothing has changed since, the independent Climate Action Tracker said in its report.

That means the world is now “headed towards an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius” (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, the threshold the world adopted during the Paris Agreement, according to the report.

Climate change is caused mainly by the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fuels such as gas, oil and coal. Confronting it means finding ways to drastically cut the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere each year. Countries establish plans to reduce emissions, with the speed of reductions and ways to achieve them differing by country.

But even if nations fulfil all their climate promises – which is a big if – the globe will end the century 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, the report said.

The effects of inaction are already being felt, said Dalton Tagelagi, prime minister of the small Pacific Island of Niue. Climate change, coupled with this year’s extra-strong El Nino – a temporary warming in parts of the equatorial Pacific that increases extreme events such as heatwaves, floods and droughts – are a warning of what could be in store.

“Sea temperatures in the central Pacific are more than three degrees above normal. It is a warning of what is coming if we do not cut emissions now,” Tagelagi said.

Vulnerable nations ask climate polluters to pay up

Leaders from countries ravaged by climate change said adequate financing must be made available to deal with climate disasters, such as the 2022 floods in Pakistan that submerged over a third of the country, resulting in thousands of deaths and more than US$30 billion in damage.

“The future we feared has become the present we are living,” said Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. “Climate change knows no borders. No nation can face it alone.”

But how much can be accomplished at the summit is in question, as some of the top-polluting countries stayed away.

The United States – the world’s second-largest polluter after China and the largest historical polluter – was again absent after US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from climate negotiations. Still, a group of US state and local leaders arrived in Antalya to show their commitment to combating climate change.

Speaking at an event on the sidelines of the talks, California Governor Gavin Newsom said Trump’s “head is soaked with oil”.

“He’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Oil. And we have been on the receiving end of some of the most aggressive assaults on our climate leadership in a generation,” he said. “I don’t expect that his secretary of energy or secretary of interior are going to do anything but double down [on their current policies].”

In a side event with chanting and applauding activists, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, which hosted last year’s negotiations, said: “Nobody, no one from planet Earth, no country, no authority has more authority than Brazil when it comes to the climate, when it comes to the environmental issue.”

Lula challenged Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron by name and the governments of Germany and Portugal – “countries that used to dictate the rules to us” – to invest more in a fund to save tropical forestland, like Brazil has.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg chided those in power for failing to address the climate crisis.

“The planet is not dying, it is being killed,” Thunberg said at a news conference on the sidelines of the summit. “And we know by who. And it is being killed by the very same people often thought to come to our rescue. No one is coming to our rescue.”

The United Kingdom on Thursday announced the appointment of a special envoy to tackle security threats from climate change, one of the first such appointments anywhere in the world.

The appointment of Madeleine Alessandri follows a recent British government assessment warning that damage to ecosystems, driven partly by climate change, could disrupt food supplies and fuel conflict and migration since the island nation imports about 40 per cent of its food.

“The climate crisis is not a distant threat. It is upon us all now, devastating lives and livelihoods everywhere,” British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said at the summit, adding that Britain would place climate resilience high on the agenda when it assumes the G20 presidency next year.