ANTALYA, Turkey (AP) — The United Kingdom on Thursday announced the appointment of a special envoy to tackle security threats from climate change while small island leaders called for urgent action, describing
planet heating as a life-or-death issue for their people at the climate talks in the Turkish resort town of Antalya.
Alix Sebastien Pillay, the vice president of Seychelles, a 115-island archipelago in the Indian Ocean, said his country's very survival is at stake.
“It is time to move past the talking,” Pillay said. “For Seychelles, climate action is not simply an environmental priority.”
Pillay was speaking on the second day of the leaders' summit at the U.N. climate talks, where government leaders addressed the state of a warming world and what they plan to do about it. While the entire globe is threatened by souped-up storms, hotter heat waves, worsening droughts and floods, island nations are among the hardest hit by climate change as they also have to deal with rising seas swallowing up their land.
Pillay said Seychelles is experiencing millions of dollars of damage as a result of storms and floods, despite contributing little to increased global warming.
He said a U.N. fund created for compensating for climate-related loss and damage needs to be urgently strengthened. “Climate recovery must not come at the expense of our development or push vulnerable nations further into unsustainable debt.”
Speaking at the talks, Dalton Tagelagi, prime minister of the small Pacific Island of Niue, said the El Niño conditions which have driven up global temperatures are a warning of what might happen if planet heating is not controlled.
“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.
The comment came as a report said the world has failed to slow global warming trends in the past five years because plans weren’t realized and efforts that would have helped were canceled out.
“Aggregated climate action has now essentially stalled for five consecutive years with positive and negative actions canceling each other out,” the independent Climate Action Tracker said in its report. 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 report said.
Climate change is caused mainly by the release of greenhouse gases, which happens when fuels like gas, oil and coal are burned. Confronting climate change means finding ways to drastically cut the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere each year. Countries establish plans to reduce emissions, called nationally determined contributions. The speed of reductions and ways to achieve them are different by country.
Because collective efforts of countries haven't significantly reduced global emissions, the world is now “headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius” (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, which is the warming threshold the world adopted during the Paris Agreement, according to the report.
The report said if the nations of the world fulfill 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 preindustrial times.
On Thursday, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced the appointment of a special representative to deal with security risks from the climate crisis, one of the first such appointments anywhere in the world.
“Climate is a national security issue,” Burnham said at the summit. “The climate crisis is not a distant threat. It is upon us all now devastating lives and livelihoods everywhere."
He said Britain would place climate resilience high on the agenda when it assumes the G20 presidency next year.
The appointment of Madeleine Alessandri as special representative for climate security follows a British government assessment earlier this year 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% of its food.
Climate activists said, however, that Burnham’s policies do not fully align with the sense of urgency he expressed in his speech.
“Burnham needs to start bridging the widening chasm between words and deeds on climate action,” said Ami McCarthy of Greenpeace UK in a statement.
“The future we feared has become the present we are living. Climate change knows no borders. No nation can face it alone. Solidarity must mean real action,” said Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
Sharif, like many other leaders from countries ravaged by climate impacts, said adequate financing needs to be made available to deal with climate disasters, such as the 2022 floods in Pakistan that submerged over a third of the country and resulted in thousands of deaths and over $30 billion in damage.
A day earlier, Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine described fossil fuel expansion as "something to fear."
“Every new oil well drilled, every piece of coal extracted is a threat to my country’s future," Heine said. “No one has the right to pollute their neighbors.” She said the response of the world to the inevitability of passing the 1.5-degree warming limit target “must be overwhelming or the world we know is over.”
Meanwhile, climate activist Greta Thunberg, attending her first U.N. climate summit since 2021, said those in power were failing to address the climate crisis.
“We are heading toward a future of more genocides and ecocides where basic necessities become luxury,” Thunberg said at a news conference on the sidelines of the summit.
“The planet is not dying, it is being killed," she said. "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 last time Thunberg attended a climate summit was the 2021 talks in Glasgow, Scotland, where she dismissed world leaders’ promises as “blah, blah, blah.”
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Webber reported from Chicago, Borenstein from Kensington, Maryland, and Arasu from Bengaluru, India.
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