In a dire warning, the UN's World Meteorological Organization said the past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, with an acceleration in sea level rise, glacier melt and heatwaves. "How many more wake-up calls does the world - and world leaders - actually need?", he said. "Whilst I do understand that leaders around the world have faced competing priorities this year, we must be clear: as challenging as our current moment is, inaction is myopic and can only defer climate catastrophe," said Alok Sharma, British president of the previous COP26 as he handed over the chairmanship to Egypt. Promises made under the 2015 Paris Agreement would, if kept, only shave off a few tenths of a degree. Current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and Earth's surface heat up 2.8C, according to findings unveiled last week. "The heart of implementation is everybody everywhere in the world every single day doing everything they possibly can to address the climate crisis," he said. "We will be holding people to account, be they presidents, prime ministers, CEOs," Stiell said as the 13-day summit opened. But Simon Stiell, the UN's climate change executive secretary, said he would not be a "custodian of backsliding" on the goal of slashing greenhouse emissions 45 percent by 2030 to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above late-19th-century levels. The conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh comes in a fraught year marked by Russia's war on Ukraine, an energy crunch, soaring inflation and the lingering effects from the Covid pandemic. Massive floods devastated swaths of Pakistan and Nigeria, droughts worsened in Africa and the western United States, cyclones whipped the Caribbean, and unprecedented heatwaves seared three continents.
Just in the past few months, climate-induced catastrophes have killed thousands, displaced millions and cost billions in damages across the world. The UN's COP27 climate summit kicked off Sunday in Egypt with warnings against backsliding on efforts to cut emissions and calls for rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme weather disasters.
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