Leaders of countries already hit hard by climate change tell UN summit that urgent action is needed

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

Leaders of countries already hit hard by climate change tell UN summit that urgent action is needed“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 U.N. 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 heat waves, 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 U.N. 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.

A report released Thursday offered a grim assessment: Progress in slowing global warming has essentially stalled for the past five years because any steps forward were canceled 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 from warming projections, but nothing has changed since, the independent Climate Action Tracker said in its report.

That means the world is now “headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius” 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 like 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 fulfill all their climate promises — which is a big if — the globe will end the century 2.6 degrees Celsius 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 Niño — a temporary warming in parts of the equatorial Pacific that increase extreme events such as heat waves, 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. 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 over $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 President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from climate negotiations. Still, a group of U.S. 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 Gov. 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 .”