Leaders of countries already hit hard by climate change tell UN summit that urgent action is needed

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Leaders of countries already hit hard by climate change tell UN summit that urgent action is needed

ANTALYA, Turkey — Urgent action is needed to help countries hardest-hit by the effects of climate change, small island leaders said Thursday at the United Nations climate talks in Turkey, describing global warming as a life-or-death issue for their people.

“It is time to move past the talking,” said Alix Sebastien Pillay, vice president of Seychelles, who said the survival of his country, a 115-island archipelago in the Indian Ocean, is at stake. “For Seychelles, climate action is not simply an environmental priority.”

Pillay spoke on the second day of the leaders' summit at the U.N. climate conference, where governments are trying to reach consensus on how to address climate change and help countries at greatest risk. While the entire globe is threatened by souped-up storms, hotter heat waves, worsening droughts and bigger floods, island nations are among the hardest hit by climate change as they also have to deal with rising seas swallowing their land.

Pillay said Seychelles is experiencing millions of dollars of damage despite contributing little to global warming, and said a U.N. fund created for compensating vulnerable nations must be urgently strengthened.

“Climate recovery must not come at the expense of our development or push vulnerable nations further into unsustainable debt,” he said.

A report released Thursday offered a grim assessment: Progress in slowing global warming has essentially stalled for the past five years because any steps forward were canceled out by inaction elsewhere.

The first five years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world did so much that it trimmed an entire degree Celsius from warming projections, but nothing has changed since, the independent Climate Action Tracker said in its report.

That means the world is now “headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius” above pre-industrial temperatures, the threshold the world adopted during the Paris Agreement, according to the report.

Climate change is caused mainly by the…

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