Nations urged to tackle ‘urgent threats’ at UN talks

With the direst warnings yet of impending environmental disaster still ringing in their ears, representatives from nearly 200 nations gathered on Sunday in Poland to firm up their plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The UN climate summit comes at a crucial juncture in mankind’s response to planetary warming. The smaller, poorer nations that will bare its devastating brunt are pushing for richer states to make good on the promises they made in the 2015 Paris agreement.

In Paris three years ago, countries committed to limit global temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and to the safer cap of 1.5C if at all possible.

But with only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, the world has already seen a crescendo of deadly wildfires, heatwaves and hurricanes made more destructive by rising seas.

In a rare intervention, presidents of previous UN climate summits issued a joint statement as the talks got underway in the Polish mining city of Katowice, calling on states to take “decisive action... to tackle these urgent threats”.

“The impacts of climate change are increasingly hard to ignore,” said the statement.

“We require deep transformations of our economies and societies.”

KATOWICE (POLAND):