Humanity must choose between hope and surrender, Guterres tells meet
Fiercer weather and worsening wildfires drove more than 20m people a year from their homes over the last decade, says charity as talks on climate change begin in Spain
Confronted with a climate crisis threatening civilisation itself, humanity must choose between hope and surrender, UN chief Antonio Guterres told the opening plenary of a UN climate conference on Monday.
“One is the path of surrender, where we have sleepwalked past the point of no return, jeopardising the health and safety of everyone on this planet,” Guterres said.
“Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand, that fiddled while the planet burned?” In a separate forum moments earlier, US Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi told the “COP25” conference that the world could still count on the United States despite President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement.
Swedish teen eco-warrior Greta Thunberg was nearing the Portuguese coast on Monday after crossing the Atlantic in a catamaran to attend a UN climate change summit in Madrid, her entourage said.
Thunberg, 16, has become the face of young peoples’ demands for climate action and made a point of making the journey back from September’s New York climate summit by sea rather than fuel-guzzling plane.
She had expected to be heading for Chile, but the South American nation passed the hosting of the COP25 summit meeting to Spain after suffering a spate of deadly anti-government protests.
States and cities home to two-thirds of the US population are committed to the targets set by the 2015 agreement, as are all the Democratic candidates for president, according the US research groups.
“We’re here to say to all of you, on behalf of the House of Representatives and the Congress of the United States, we’re still in it, we’re still in it,” Pelosi said to applause at a forum of heads of state from climate-vulnerable nations.
Leading the 15- strong congressional delegation, Pelosi came to Madrid even as her colleagues in the House consider articles of impeachment against Trump.
Trump has dismissed global warming as a hoax, and dismantled many of the climate and environmental protection policies set in place by his predecessor Barack Obama.
Last month Trump gave formal notice of the US withdrawal from the 196-nation Paris climate treaty, which calls for capping global warming at well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and 1.5C if possible.
In his impassioned appeal, Guterres cited new findings from the World Meterological Organisation (WMO) confirming that the last five years have been the hottest ever recorded.
Concentration of planet-warming CO2 in the atmosphere has also reached levels not seen in three to five million years, the WMO will report this week.
“The last time there was a comparable concentration,” Guterres said, “the temperature was two to three degrees Celsius warmer, and sea levels were 10 to 20 metres (32 to 66 feet) higher than today.” A major UN science report last year reset the Paris accord’s threshold for a climate-safe world from 2C to 1.5C, concluding that the global economy must be “carbon neutral” by 2050 to stay under that threshold.
“What is still lacking is political will − to put a price on carbon, to stop subsidies on fossil fuels, to stop building coal power plants,” Guterres said.
“The best available science, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tells us today that going beyond that (1.5C) would lead us to catastrophic disaster.” President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands warned that breaching the 1.5C barrier would spell the end of her water-bound homeland.
“The most vulnerable atoll nations like my country already face death row” due to rising seas and devastating storm surges,” she said via a remote video link-up.
Governments that fail to come forward with strong carbon-cutting commitments over the next year are effectively “passing sentence on our future, forcing our country to die.” The talks in Madrid are focused on finalising rules for global carbon markets, and setting up a fund to help countries already reeling from climate-enhanced heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms made worse by rising seas.
Frontline negotiators describe COP25 as “technical talks” setting the stage for next year’s meeting in Glasgow, where countries must confront the yawning gap between the Paris targets and current emissions.
But events outside the conference hall in Madrid may change the agenda.
“A key question will be to what extent the growing social movements throughout the world will be factored into decisions of the COP25,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and, as a former negotiator for France, a main architect of the Paris Agreement.
A climate action group steeped in civil disobedience, meanwhile, laid plans to descend on the Spanish capital.
“Extinction Rebellion calls on Rebels Without Borders to come to Madrid,” the group said in a tweet, using the hashtag #Ultimatumcop25.
“Extinction Rebellion reminds leaders they cannot flee the climate and ecological emergency,” the group said separately in a press release.
“Civil disobedience and direct nonviolent actions coordinated by global rebels will fill Madrid’s streets and squares.”
Fiercer weather and worsening wildfires drove more than 20 million people a year from their homes over the last decade — a problem set to worsen unless leaders act swiftly to head off surging climate threats, anti-poverty charity Oxfam said on Monday.
Much of the displacement caused by cyclones, floods and fires appeared temporary and in some cases due to better efforts to evacuate people ahead of danger, Oxfam researchers said.
But its “sheer scale” was a surprise, said Tim Gore, Oxfam’s climate policy leader, with island nations like Cuba, Dominica and Tuvalu seeing on average close to 5% of their people out of their homes in any given year.
“This is the warming world we have long been warning about. Now we’re seeing it play out before our eyes,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
As two weeks of UN climate change negotiations began Monday in Madrid, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said it was widely accepted that one of the most severe effects of climate change would be on human migration.
“Extreme weather events are already displacing many more people than violent conflicts,” she said on a panel with leaders of vulnerable countries at the talks.
“Slow onset events like sea-level rise and desertification get even lower global focus.” She said international discussions should focus on helping affected countries relocate people at risk and protect those who have been displaced, including by creating a global framework to address their needs.
The Oxfam study, released on Monday, examined the numbers of people displaced inside their home countries by climate-fuelled disasters between 2008 and 2018, based on government and international agency data, as well as media reports.
People were three times more likely to be displaced by cyclones, floods or fires than by conflicts, it found.
Some countries, like war-torn Somalia, were battered by both droughts and floods, sometimes in the same year.
That “confluence of disasters” leaves many poor nations — where most of the displacement is occurring — struggling to recover from one crisis before the next hits, said Gore of Oxfam.
Some have run aid appeals for both drought and flood relief simultaneously, he said. “This is extraordinary,” he said.
“This is climate chaos — what it actually looks like.”
Seven of the top 10 countries with the highest displacement by proportion of their population were developing island states, largely in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the report found.
But around 80% of all people forced from their homes by weather disasters over the last decade were in Asia, where large populations in countries from the Philippines to Sri Lanka live in areas threatened by cyclones or flooding, it said.
In May, Cyclone Fani alone led to the displacement of 3.5 million people in Bangladesh and India, most of them evacuated in advance of the storm in order to hold down casualties.
Overall, the number of weather disasters considered extreme grew five-fold over the last decade, researchers said. Another analysis, released on Monday by aid charity Save the Children, found that extreme weather in eastern and southern Africa this year — including two cyclones that hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi — drove as many people from their homes by June as in all of 2018 in the region.
The Oxfam study did not look comprehensively at how many people were uprooted by “slow onset” disasters like droughts, where it is harder to judge the beginning and end, Gore said.
Including drought-linked displacement would make the numbers “much higher”, he added.
It also did not estimate how much of the displacement became permanent — “a really unknown quantity,” Gore said.
In 2018, Oxfam made a rough estimate of the number displaced by extreme weather disasters during the year who were still out of their homes by the end of it, and came up with about 10-20%.
As more people leave their homes as a result of weather disasters, costs — and threats to social stability — are rising quickly for the countries trying to manage that displacement, often with few resources, the report said.