Speaking from Tonga on Tuesday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres issued a “global SOS,” urging governments to increase climate action to “Save Our Seas.”
By: Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Guterres called for international leaders to slash global greenhouse gas emissions, rapidly phase out fossil fuels and boost investments in climate adaptation to protect people from future and current risks, UN News reported.
“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,” Guterres said in a sea level rise press conference in Nuku’alofa, Tonga’s capital. “But if we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves. The world must act and answer the SOS before it is too late.”
UN Chief Guterres Issues ‘Global SOS’ to World Leaders to ‘Save Our Seas’“The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.”— Jacques Cousteauhttps://t.co/zKiMM5uTJB
— Karen Gruber (@mail4ufromme1) August 29, 2024
Guterres emphasized that average sea levels worldwide are rising at rates not seen in the last 3,000 years.
“The reason is clear: greenhouse gases – overwhelmingly generated by burning fossil fuels – are cooking our planet. And the sea is taking the heat – literally,” he said.
In the last 50 years, Earth’s seas have absorbed 90-plus percent of global heating. As water temperatures rise, water expands. Meanwhile, melting ice sheets and glaciers have increased the volume of the ocean, causing it to overflow.
Two new UN studies “throw the situation into sharp relief,” the UN chief said.
A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) study, State of the Climate in the South-West Pacific, along with a UN Climate Action Team report, Surging seas in a warming world, “show that changes to the ocean are accelerating, with devastating impacts,” Guterres said.
The two reports illustrate how sea surface temperatures across the globe are continuing to break monthly records. Meanwhile, marine heat waves are lasting longer and becoming more intense. Since 1980, they have doubled in frequency. Rising sea levels are making the severity and frequency of coastal flooding and storm surges more pronounced as well.
“Today’s reports confirm that relative sea levels in the Southwestern Pacific have risen even more than the global average – in some locations, by more than double the global increase in the past 30 years,” Guterres said.
Guterres explained that, as the average elevation of the Pacific Islands is barely above sea level, they “are uniquely exposed.” Roughly 90 percent of the islands’ inhabitants are within 3.1 miles of the coast, with half of infrastructure within 0.3 miles of the coastline.
“Without drastic cuts to emissions, the Pacific Islands can expect at least 15 centimetres of additional sea level rise by mid-century, and more than 30 days per year of coastal flooding in some places,” Guterres warned.
The UN chief highlighted the findings of emerging science, which suggest that a rise of two degrees Celsius in the average global temperature above pre-industrial levels could mean the collapse of the West Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets, essentially “condemning future generations to unstoppable sea level rise of up to 20 metres — over a period of millennia.”
Currently the planet is on course for a three-degree temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, which would lead to sea level rise occurring much faster, causing catastrophic conditions in Tonga and other low-lying island nations.
“Surging seas are coming for us all – together with the devastation of fishing, tourism, and the Blue Economy,” Guterres said.
He pointed out that approximately a billion people on the planet live in coastal regions, including megacities like Los Angeles, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Shanghai, Mumbai and Lagos, Nigeria.
Coastal flooding and other extreme events would occur more frequently with rising seas, the UN chief said. A temperature increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius could up the rate of these disasters from once a century to once every five years by 2100.
The economic damage could reach trillions of dollars without new protection and adaptation measures, and Guterres urged world leaders to take action to prevent this immediately.
He emphasized the necessity of limiting worldwide temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by “cutting global emissions 43 percent compared to 2019 levels by 2030, and 60 percent by 2035.”
The secretary-general called on governments to provide new Nationally Determined Contributions — climate action plans — by 2025, which they promised to do at last year’s UN COP28 climate conference.
Guterres urged G20 nations, which are “the biggest emitters” in the world, to lead efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions. He also highlighted the need to “massively increase finance and support for vulnerable countries. We need a surge in funds to deal with surging seas.”
He also pointed out the importance of making “significant contributions” to the Loss and Damage Fund to support vulnerable countries, like those in the Pacific Islands.
“Finally, we need to protect every person on Earth with an early warning system by 2027,” the UN chief said. “That means building up countries’ data capacities to improve decision-making on adaptation and coastal planning.”
Cristen is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She holds a JD and an Ocean & Coastal Law Certificate from University of Oregon School of Law and an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of the short story collection The Smallest of Entryways, as well as the travel biography, Ernest’s Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway’s Life.
