The UK appointed Madeleine Alessandri as special representative for climate security at COP31 in Antalya, while Seychelles and Niue leaders called climate change a life-or-death issue for their nations.
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.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced the appointment of Madeleine Alessandri as special representative for climate security, 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 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.
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 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."
Dalton Tagelagi, prime minister of the small Pacific Island of Niue, said El Niño 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.
A report from the independent Climate Action Tracker 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 Climate Action Tracker said in its report.
The report said 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. If nations fulfill all their climate promises, the globe will end the century 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times.
Greta Thunberg, attending her first U.N. climate summit since 2021, said those in power were failing to address the climate crisis.
"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 appointment of a climate security envoy by the UK, combined with warnings from island leaders at COP31, highlights the growing treatment of climate change as a national security issue. The Climate Action Tracker report indicates that global climate action has stalled for five consecutive years, with the world on track to exceed the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
The day's checked news, by email
One short email a day with the top stories. Free, and you can unsubscribe in one click.
Or follow for the latest news:
No comments yet. Start the discussion.
WorldTrending
A driver in his forties died after a collision between two SUVs on Route 365 in Pont-Rouge, Quebec, shortly before 7 a.m. Thursday, according to the Sûreté du Québec.
The Trump administration says it returned more than $12 billion in revenue from Venezuelan oil sales since ousting Nicolás Maduro in January, according to a State Department report.
