A UN chief issued an apocalyptic warning to world leaders at a global warming summit in Egypt on Monday: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”.
United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres told the COP27 gathering in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh that the world was in the “fight of our lives and we are losing”.
Seeking to spark far more urgent action from many nations in the battle against climate change, he stressed: “Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
Mr Guterres called for a pact between the world’s richest and poorest countries to speed up the transition from fossil fuels and the delivery of the funding needed to ensure poorer countries can reduce emissions and cope with the unavoidable impacts of warming that had already occurred.
“The two largest economies — the United States and China — have a particular responsibility to join efforts to make this pact a reality,” he added.
Scientists have warned for years of the approaching climate change nightmare for millions of people. But Simon Stiell, of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, stated that the crisis was now hitting with devastating floods, warmer temperatures, destroyed crops and homes and more violent weather patterns.
The past eight years are on track to be the hottest on record, with the sea level rise accelerating, the melting of Europe’s alpine glaciers shattering records and devastating floods, including in Pakistan, drought and heatwaves and unusually warm autumn weather including in Britain.
At the start of the COP27 climate summit, Mr Stiell emphasised that the world was “off track” to halve carbon emissions by 2030 and get to net zero by 2050. “The latest scientific reports show slight improvement, the emission curve is bending very, very slightly, which is a positive sign,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “So, some of what we are doing is having an impact but it’s nowhere enough or fast enough.
“It’s not at the scale that is needed to avert the crisis that we — not are facing — it’s a crisis we are in and it’s a crisis that is going to just get worse and worse as the years pass.”
Amid growing anger at world leaders for failing to act swiftly enough, environmental protesters this morning disrupted sections of the M25 despite a major Metropolitan Police operation to foil their plans. The Just Stop Oil demonstrators caused major delays for thousands trying to get to work.
Mr Stiell stated that just 29 out of 194 countries had delivered tougher plans to fight climate change, that they promised at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last autumn where the aim was to “keep alive” the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Leading scientists say there is now no “credible pathway” to achieving this and that under current policies the world is now at risk of an apocalyptic temperature rise of 2.8C this century.
More than 100 world leaders are attending the summit including US president Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak — who decided only in recent days to go — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron.
But notable “no shows” included the leaders of big polluting countries such as China, Australia, India, as well as major oil producers Russia and Canada.
Stressing the need for a “collective effort”, Mr Stiell added: “Wars will end, pandemics end, economic crises there is recovery, climate change simply marches on irrespective of geography, boundaries, of global leaders.”
With the summit already hit by a row over who should pay for the damage caused by global warming, Mr Stiell added that many of the countries being hardest hit now by climate change had contributed the least to the problem.
Wealthy nations needed to “come to the table” with finance to alleviate some of this climate change destruction and allow less developed countries to leap-frog the use of fossil fuels to develop their economies and instead use cleaner technologies.
Business Secretary Grant Shapps said the Government was “supportive of discussions” going on at COP27 about these loss and damage payments.
Asked if the Government is accepting the principle of loss and damage payments to poorer countries disproportionally affected by climate change, he said: “We’re accepting the principle there’s a discussion to be had about this, and actually, in a sense, that’s been accepted all along. Today for example, the Prime Minister’s announcing over £65 million of assistance to developing countries to be able to produce energy in a sustainable way, there’s been a tacit acceptance. We industrialised first and we appreciate the rest of the world needs to be able to bring themselves along as well.”
Ahead of a speech to the summit, Mr Sunak called for the world to “deliver on the legacy” of COP26, for the sake of people’s “children and grandchildren”. He added: “The world came together in Glasgow with one last chance to create a plan that would limit global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees. The question today is: can we summon the collective will to deliver on those promises? I believe we can. By honouring the pledges we made in Glasgow, we can turn our struggle against climate change into a global mission for new jobs and clean growth.”
He was also holding a series of bilateral meetings including with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen amid tensions with the bloc over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, as well as with Mr Macron to discuss fresh moves to stop the cross-Channel migration crisis, and Italy’s new far-Right PM Giorgia Meloni.
