World leaders urge stronger, faster action at UN climate talks

ANTALYA (AP):

World leaders called for urgent and decisive action on global warming Wednesday as formal talks began at the United Nations (UN) climate conference in Turkey, saying the crisis is disproportionately harming some of the world’s most vulnerable countries.

“You might as well bomb us. That might have been easier than watching climate change tear apart our homes piece by piece,” said Surangel Whipps Jr, president of the island nation of Palau. “We are at war with a crisis we did not create. A war no peace treaty can end, only urgent action can.”

The annual summit follows a year of deadly floods, heat waves and other disasters. Leaders said geopolitical conflicts had diverted attention from climate change.

Earlier this year, the UN said it is inevitable that the world will warm beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

Limiting warming to that threshold was a goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement and remains a focus of international negotiations. The UN wants the world to limit how long and how much temperatures shoot past that mark and somehow get back down below it by the end of the century. That’s called overshoot.

“The evidence is now in. We did not try hard enough,” said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who said five years ago that the 1.5-degree threshold was necessary for survival.

“Overshoot is not a new target, it’s a debt,” she added. “A debt of heat borrowed against our children’s future and it must be repaid.”

She said every five years of delay increases projected peak warming by a tenth of a degree, “and a tenth of a degree, my friends, is a coral reef. It’s a harvest, it’s a village, and lives and livelihoods will be affected. Ask Nepal, where more than 1,400 people died in the floods in August, and thousands are still missing”.

‘Every fraction of a degree counts’

UN Secretary-General António Guterres outlined a framework for climate negotiations, saying they must prioritise ending fossil fuel reliance, adapting to a warmer world, increasing financial support for poorer countries bearing the brunt of climate change, and promoting cooperation over conflict.

“We know the truth. Now we must act on it because climate action is more than a fight over a number or a thermometer,” Guterres said in his opening speech. “We are in the fight for our lives and our children’s future.

“We do not need countries to agree on everything. But we do need them to cooperate on the things no country can solve alone.”

Addressing climate change has been overshadowed by wars, inflation and geopolitical conflicts, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said. He pledged to protect the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, and urged world leaders to work together for a just, sustainable future.

“Brazil is back to defend the continuity of a healthy planet,” said Lula, who recently won reelection.

Micronesian President Wesley Simina said his country is already suffering irreversible losses of coral reefs that “protect our shores, sustain our fisheries, feed our families and carry the stories and traditions of our communities.”

He called climate change the “single greatest threat to the security, livelihoods, and well-being of Pacific peoples, but perhaps worse than what we’ve already experienced is what has yet to come” as temperatures continue to rise.

Both Simina and Mottley called for these climate talks to come to an agreement to slash methane – a short-lived but extra powerful heat-trapping gas – which Mottley said could “buy time to supercharge” technology to help cut longer-lived carbon dioxide. She said cutting methane by about half by 2030 could help avoid almost 0.3 degrees of warming by the 2040s “and save 250,000 lives every year”.