United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has warned of the devastating consequences of rising sea levels worldwide.
According to BBC, the UN general secretary at the Pacific Island Forum Leaders Meeting in Tonga declared that ‘surging seas are coming for us all.’
Guterres in a speech at the forum highlighted, “This is a crazy situation. Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making. A crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”
He further added, “A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril. The ocean is overflowing... The reason is clear: greenhouse gases, overwhelmingly generated by burning fossil fuels, are cooking our planet. The sea is taking the heat, literally.”
Moreover, Guterres told the BBC, “The Pacific is today the most vulnerable area of the world. There is an enormous injustice in relation to the Pacific, and it’s the reason I am here.”
“The small islands don’t contribute to climate change, but everything that happens because of climate change is multiplied here,” he continued.
As per the general secretary, the only way to prevent the ‘irreversible collapse of Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets’ is by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, which means ‘cutting global emissions 43% compared to 2019 levels by 2030 and 60% by 2035.’
