Climate Morning Star
Small island leaders tell Cop31 of need for urgent action on climate change
LEADERS of small island countries have demanded urgent action to combat global warming, telling the Cop31 climate summit today that the issue is a matter of life or death for their people. “It is time
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“It is time to move past the talking,” said Seychelles vice-president Alix Sebastien Pillay. “For Seychelles, climate action is not simply an environmental priority. It is a fundamental issue to our national security, economic stability, sustainable development and our very survival.”
Mr Pillay was speaking on the second day of the leaders’ summit at the United Nations climate conference. While the entire globe is threatened by climate change causing more extreme weather, island nations also have to deal with rising seas swallowing up their land.
He said Seychelles is experiencing millions of pounds’ worth of damage from storms and floods, which are made worse by climate change despite the Indian Ocean country producing only small quantities of the planet-heating gases that drive global warming.
Mr Pillay said a UN fund created to compensate for climate-related loss and damage needs to be urgently strengthened, adding: “Climate recovery must not come at the expense of our development or push vulnerable nations further into unsustainable debt.”
Dalton Tagelagi, prime minister of the small Pacific island of Niue, said the El Nino conditions that have raised temperatures across the world were a warning of what might happen if global warming is not controlled.
The urgent need for action was underlined by a report from the independent Climate Action Tracker, which said: “Aggregated climate action has now essentially stalled for five consecutive years, with positive and negative actions cancelling each other out.”
In the first five years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world managed to cut 1°C from warming projections, but nothing has changed since then, the report said.
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