Addressing a meeting of the Pacific island leaders in Tonga earlier, the UN secretary general crossed a red line and said that the region remained ‘uniquely vulnerable’.
The United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has sounded what could be regarded as his yearly climate alarm, this time on the state of the seas, saying the failure to cut on greenhouse gases will lead to a calamity of a dimension that will be unimaginable.
At a meeting of the Pacific Island regional leaders on Tuesday in the country’s capital, Nuku’alofa, he held a lamenting note that ‘there is no liferaft to return’.
This is a crazy situation: The problem of the rise of seas is that this is a real global calamity, and it is man-made. ’An impending calamity that is going to rapidly grow to the magnitude of a near catastrophe’, he said. “The reason is clear: The greenhouse gases, primarily produced by burning fossil fuels, are roasting our planet, and the sea is boiling literally.
Nuku’alofa is currently accommodating over a thousand international delegates in the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting that ends on August 30.
Climatic change and the effects it has in areas that are affected by rising sea levels in the Pacific region are topical in the meeting of regional administrators who administer some of the most vulnerable states in the world.
Guterres, who last attended the Leaders Meeting in 2019, said that about 90 percent of the people in SLCPs are living close to the coast with an average distance of 5 km (3 miles), while the average elevation of the islands is only one to 1-2 meters (3.
