The globe is engaged in “a life-or-death struggle” for survival as “climate disaster gallops ahead,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said today. He also criticised the 20 richest nations in the world of not doing enough to prevent global warming.
The head of the UN claimed that greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high and continuing to rise, calling for “a quantum level compromise” between wealthy industrialised nations who produced the majority of the gases and developing nations that frequently experience their worst impacts.
As government delegates gathered in Kinshasa, Congo, to plan for the significant UN-led climate summit that will take place in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in November, Guterres gave a speech.
There have been significant global climate consequences recently, including floods that submerged a third of Pakistan and the warmest summer in Europe in 500 years, as well as storms and typhoons that have devastated the Philippines, Cuba, and the US state of Florida.
In recent weeks, Guterres has stepped up his campaign for “loss and damage,” the climate movement’s term for forcing polluters to pay for their actions, and he emphasised today that people need to take action immediately.
Failure to respond to loss and harm will result in further erosion of trust and deterioration of the climate. There is no way to overlook the moral need of this.
The COP27 summit in Egypt “must be the platform for action on loss and damage,” according to Guterres.
He stated that commitments from the so-called G20 group of the world’s 20 largest nations “are coming much too little, and far too late” in unusually scathing terms.
It is “closing the door on our hopes to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, let alone fulfil the 1. 5 degree objective,” Guterres cautioned in his statement.
We are fighting for both our survival and today’s safety in a life-or-death situation, he declared.
As stated by Guterres, “COP27 is the venue for all countries — led by the G20 — to demonstrate that they are in this battle and in it together.” The greatest way to demonstrate this is to attend COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Data reveals that rich countries, particularly the United States, have greatly exceeded their share of carbon dioxide emissions through the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. More harm has been done than expected to poor countries like Pakistan and Cuba due to global carbon emissions.
Loss and damage have been discussed for years, but wealthy countries have frequently shied away from negotiations about how to pay for previous climate calamities, like this summer’s flooding in Pakistan.
The issue is crucial for the developing world, and Guterres is urging wealthy nations “not to try and brush it under the carpet. G20 nations have to take responsibility for the great need their actions have caused,” according to Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa, an organisation that works to mobilise climate action in Africa.
Professor Michael Oppenheimer of climate science and international affairs at Princeton University stated in an email that high-income countries and other major emitters, such as China, “will need to grapple seriously with loss and damage” if they want the UN convention on climate change to remain useful.
Negotiations “are heading for interminable deadlock” without it, he said.
Poor nations with low emissions may simply refuse to talk about anything else until the problem has been remedied, according to Oppenheimer.
Even then, wealthier nations will have to make payments, not just make pledges as they have in the past, he added. Richer countries may find a method to avoid paying for direct harm by paying poorer ones more to adapt to decrease future disasters.
Adelle Thomas, a climate scientist from the Bahamas, said Guterres’ comments “confirm what small islands and least developed countries have been claiming for decades — that loss and harm is indisputable and already disproportionately hurting the most vulnerable governments and communities.”
The industrialised nations must act now rather than continuing to put off taking action with hollow pledges and drawn-out negotiations, she continued.
UN chief: Survival is a “life-or-death struggle” for the entire world
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