UK Appoints Climate Security Envoy     11/12 06:21

   

   ANTALYA, Turkey (AP) -- The United Kingdom on Thursday announced the 
appointment of a special envoy to tackle security threats from climate change 
while small island leaders called for urgent action, describing planet heating 
as a life-or-death issue for their people at the climate talks in the Turkish 
resort town of Antalya.

   Alix Sebastien Pillay, the vice president of Seychelles, a 115-island 
archipelago in the Indian Ocean, said his country's very survival is at stake.

   "It is time to move past the talking," Pillay said. "For Seychelles, climate 
action is not simply an environmental priority."

   Pillay was speaking on the second day of the leaders' summit at the U.N. 
climate talks, where government leaders addressed the state of a warming world 
and what they plan to do about it. While the entire globe is threatened by 
souped-up storms, hotter heat waves, worsening droughts and floods, island 
nations are among the hardest hit by climate change as they also have to deal 
with rising seas swallowing up their land.

   Pillay said Seychelles is experiencing millions of dollars of damage as a 
result of storms and floods, despite contributing little to increased global 
warming.

   He said a U.N. fund created for compensating for climate-related loss and 
damage needs to be urgently strengthened. "Climate recovery must not come at 
the expense of our development or push vulnerable nations further into 
unsustainable debt."

   Grim report says world has failed to slow warming trends 

   Speaking at the talks, Dalton Tagelagi, prime minister of the small Pacific 
Island of Niue, said the El Nio conditions which have driven up global 
temperatures are a warning of what might happen if planet heating is not 
controlled.

   "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.

   The comment came as a report said the world has failed to slow global 
warming trends in the past five years because plans weren't realized and 
efforts that would have helped were canceled out.

   "Aggregated climate action has now essentially stalled for five consecutive 
years with positive and negative actions canceling each other out," the 
independent Climate Action Tracker said in its report. The first five years 
after the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world did so much that it trimmed an entire 
degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) from warming projections, but nothing 
has changed since, the report said.

   Climate change is caused mainly by the release of greenhouse gases, which 
happens when fuels like gas, oil and coal are burned. Confronting climate 
change means finding ways to drastically cut the amount of emissions put into 
the atmosphere each year. Countries establish plans to reduce emissions, called 
nationally determined contributions. The speed of reductions and ways to 
achieve them are different by country.

   Because collective efforts of countries haven't significantly reduced global 
emissions, the world is now "headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 
degrees Celsius" (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, 
which is the warming threshold the world adopted during the Paris Agreement, 
according to the report.

   The report said if the nations of the world fulfill all their climate 
promises -- which is a big if -- the globe will end the century 2.6 degrees 
Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times.

   Britain announces appointment of first climate security risk envoy 

   On Thursday, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced the appointment 
of a special representative to deal with security risks from the climate 
crisis, one of the first such appointments anywhere in the world.

   "Climate is a national security issue," Burnham said at the summit. "The 
climate crisis is not a distant threat. It is upon us all now devastating lives 
and livelihoods everywhere."

   He said Britain would place climate resilience high on the agenda when it 
assumes the G20 presidency next year.

   The appointment of Madeleine Alessandri as special representative for 
climate security follows a British government assessment earlier this year 
warning that damage to ecosystems, driven partly by climate change, could 
disrupt food supplies and fuel conflict and migration since the island-nation 
imports about 40% of its food.

   Climate activists said, however, that Burnham's policies do not fully align 
with the sense of urgency he expressed in his speech.

   "Burnham needs to start bridging the widening chasm between words and deeds 
on climate action," said Ami McCarthy of Greenpeace UK in a statement.

   Vulnerable nations ask climate polluters to pay up 

   "The future we feared has become the present we are living. Climate change 
knows no borders. No nation can face it alone. Solidarity must mean real 
action," said Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

   Sharif, like many other leaders from countries ravaged by climate impacts, 
said adequate financing needs to be made available to deal with climate 
disasters, such as the 2022 floods in Pakistan that submerged over a third of 
the country and resulted in thousands of deaths and over $30 billion in damage.

   A day earlier, Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine described fossil fuel 
expansion as "something to fear."

   "Every new oil well drilled, every piece of coal extracted is a threat to my 
country's future," Heine said. "No one has the right to pollute their 
neighbors." She said the response of the world to the inevitability of passing 
the 1.5-degree warming limit target "must be overwhelming or the world we know 
is over."

   Greta Thunberg says planet is not dying, it's being 'killed' 

   Meanwhile, climate activist Greta Thunberg, attending her first U.N. climate 
summit since 2021, said those in power were failing to address the climate 
crisis.

   "We are heading toward a future of more genocides and ecocides where basic 
necessities become luxury," Thunberg said at a news conference on the sidelines 
of the summit.

   "The planet is not dying, it is being killed," she said. "And we know by 
who. And it is being killed by the very same people often thought to come to 
our rescue. No one is coming to our rescue."

   The last time Thunberg attended a climate summit was the 2021 talks in 
Glasgow, Scotland, where she dismissed world leaders' promises as "blah, blah, 
blah."