UK appoints climate security envoy as Thunberg criticizes COP31 leaders

Résumé détaillé

The United Kingdom has appointed a special envoy to address climate change security threats

The United Kingdom has appointed a special envoy to address climate change security threats

ANTALYA, Turkey -- 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.”

Speaking at the talks, Dalton Tagelagi, prime minister of the small Pacific Island of Niue, said the 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.

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