Cold-blooded sea creatures seeking refuge from warming ocean waters may find themselves at increasing risk of deadly cold shocks due to changes in ocean currents, new research warns.
Climate change is pushing species to higher latitudes in an attempt to stay within their range of comfortable temperatures, but this migration can come with unforeseen consequences.
The new study, published in Nature, documents a mass mortality event in March 2021 that saw at least 260 dead sea creatures wash up on the shores of South Africa.
Using satellite data, ocean observations and data on the movements of bull sharks, the researchers link the event to a sudden influx of cold water coming up from the deeper ocean.
They also show that such events have been increasing in frequency over the past three decades and forecast that this trend may continue into the future as the world continues to warm.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that “we predict this is going to become a more regular phenomenon and could impact a lot of different species”.
Marine migration
As the Earth warms, many species that are able to do so are migrating to higher latitudes, allowing them to maintain their place within their “thermal niche” – the set of temperatures at which they can comfortably survive.
Nowhere is this effect more pronounced than in the global oceans, where there are fewer barriers to migration than there are on land. On average, highly mobile marine species have been moving polewards by nearly 60km per decade since the 1950s, according to the latest report on climate impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But this migration comes with its own risks.
These shifting ranges due to climate change can introduce species to new, unfamiliar stressors – such as shipping lanes or fisheries, says Dr Natalie Posdaljian, a bioacoustician at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the study.
One of these risks is what the researchers describe as a temperature “bait and switch” – where creatures seeking warmer waters can instead be trapped by a sudden cold event. Posdaljian tells Carbon Brief that the new study is the first time that she’s seen evidence of this hazard.
Mass mortality
On 2 March 2021, dead sea creatures started washing up on the south-eastern shores of South Africa between Port Elizabeth and East London. In all, more than 250 individual organisms and 82 separate species were found, including large, migratory species such as manta rays and bull sharks.
In deducing what had happened, the team of researchers examined the temperature data in the days leading up to the event. Using satellite and other observational data, they found that the temperature of the surrounding ocean had dropped by up to 9.2C in less than 24 hours.
The cold event persisted for seven days and had “severe physiological consequences” for the marine organisms there, including hypothermia, malfunction and death, the paper says.
Similar cold shocks have previously occurred in south-eastern South Africa, dating back to at least 1989 and affecting a wide array of creatures, according to the study. But this instance was “probably the biggest cold-water shock [mass mortality event]” ever recorded, Dr Ryan Daly, a marine scientist at the Oceanographic Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, tells Carbon Brief. Daly is one of the authors of the new study.
The influx of cold water was due to a process called “upwelling”, which carries cold, nutrient-rich water from the ocean depths to its surface.
The study identifies three factors that make rapid upwelling events likely to happen: strong currents interacting with the continental shelf, strong winds blowing from the east to the west and meanders in the current. Such winds occur predominantly during the southern hemisphere’s summer, between October and April. They often act as a harbinger of temperature drops occurring in the coming 0-72 hours, the study notes.
All three of these factors are characteristic of both the south-eastern coast of South Africa and the eastern coast of Australia, where strong currents known as the Agulhas and the East Australian Current, respectively, run up against the continental shelf.
‘Trapped’
Dr Camrin Braun, an ocean ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, finds it surprising that even large, migratory species such as rays and bull sharks were killed by the cold snap. Braun, who was not involved in the new research, tells Carbon Brief that these animals “can move really far and really fast”.
Daly says that this surprised the research team as well. But it’s possible, he says, that the onset of the cold temperatures was quick enough and large enough that the animals got “trapped” instead of being able to escape.
To underscore this, the researchers use data on bull shark movements and ocean temperatures from tags attached to sharks before, during and after the event.
They find that the sharks consistently demonstrate “attempted avoidance” of lower temperatures – moving closer to the surface while swimming through upwelling areas and only travelling at deeper depths once they reach warmer waters.
The team also observe one shark taking up residence in a sheltered bay during one upwelling event to escape the cold waters. The researchers write that these actions “probably represent behavioural strategies to avoid/survive intense temperature declines”.
On its own, the shark-movement data is “kind of limited” and does not “make a very convincing case”, Braun says. But combining it with other data “really up[s] the ante on the importance” of the research, he adds.
Climate patterns
The researchers also look at several decades’ worth of sea surface temperature and wind data to understand whether these upwelling events are changing in frequency or intensity.
They identify clear increasing trends in the proportion of winds that favour upwelling events across three sites in South Africa. (Previous research has shown a similar increase in such winds in south-eastern Australia.)
Then, for the three South African sites and three Australian sites, they compare temperature data from three locations: “inshore”, defined as between 0-15km from the shore, “midshelf”, which is 15-30km from the shore and “offshore” – located within the warm “core” of the current. The inshore and midshelf locations fall within the upwelling zone, but the offshore ones do not.
If, as they hypothesised, upwelling events were becoming more frequent, the number of cold events inshore would increase over time, while the number of such events offshore would stay the same. Similarly, an upwards trend in the intensity of cold snaps would be revealed in the inshore and midshelf, but not the offshore, data.
The chart below shows that the proportion of upwelling-favourable winds (top left) at three sites in South Africa has been steadily increasing since the “upwelling season” – the period of upwelling-favourable winds stretching from October to April – of 1988-89.
The other three charts show increasing trends in the number of cold events (top right), the average intensity of cold events (bottom left) and the average rate of onset of such cold events (bottom right) for a single site, Port Alfred, over the same period. All three characteristics increase over time for the inshore (blue) and midshelf (pink) locations, but not the offshore (green) one, supporting the idea that the cold snaps are linked to upwelling.
These increases persist over long enough time periods, the authors argue, to be clear evidence of long-term trends, rather than natural variation. Furthermore, the study points to previous research – dating back more than 30 years – that shows evidence of climate change increasing upwelling intensity due in part to increasingly strong winds driven by the land warming faster than the ocean.
This trend analysis is one of the most valuable contributions of the new study, Posdaljian says. She tells Carbon Brief:
“It’s often hard to be able to have that kind of concrete evidence about how something could be increasing in intensity or frequency over time.”
The idea that climate change could lead to an increase in cold snaps may seem counterintuitive. But those increased temperatures “mean more energy in the climate [system] too”, Daly says. He explains:
“This wind-driven upwelling, linked to climate change, is essentially an extreme event – just like we might have more flooding and stronger cyclones and hurricanes.
“If you think about equivalent on land, that might be fires being fuelled by more intense wind. It takes an existing natural phenomenon and basically supercharges that to become [more] intense.”
He adds:
“Going forward, we predict that this is going to become a more regular phenomenon and could impact a lot of different species.”
The researchers “did a really good job of creating this foundational understanding” of how such cold events could hit marine ecosystems in future, Posdaljian says.
Looking ahead, she adds that she would like to see more work focusing on projecting future trends in cold snaps and perhaps even being able to predict them. She tells Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these animals are not just dealing with one stressor from climate change…We can’t necessarily mitigate these [extreme events], but what we can do is maybe reduce the other stressors that we can control.”
The post Climate change ‘bait and switch’ threatens sharks and rays appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?
More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
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The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis
In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations, which participants were invited to consider and adapt in their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process.
Getting the rules ‘right’
In a statement to Climate Home News, Ghana, Paraguay and the UK – which are FCLP co-leads for its work on forest carbon credits – said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’
The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?
An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
A relatively ambitious deal to reduce the shipping industry’s 3% of global emissions now looks more likely after four days of closed-door talks in London, observers say.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO), which oversees the negotiations, said there had been “constructive discussions” and “genuine willingness within the group to make concrete further progress”.
Em Fenton, senior director at the NGO Opportunity Green who attended the talks last week, said they “demonstrated a strong spirit of solidarity in the face of blatant attempts to undermine the credibility, ambition and equity of a hard-fought multilateral agreement”.
After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on a “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF) – a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners aimed at incentivising them to use cleaner fuels, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.
But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention by US President Donald Trump and threats of US sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.
UCL analysis found that, of those who expressed a view at last week’s talks, 38 were in favour of an NZF-style solution while only 17 were against. Those opposed are “consistently composed of strongly fossil fuel-aligned governments”.
An observer of the talks, who did not want to be named, said the countries opposed include the US, Russia, India, Thailand, Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay, as well as eight oil-rich Gulf nations and shipowner-reliant Liberia and Panama. Governments that support an NZF-style deal include China, Brazil, Mexico, Türkiye, Canada, Australia, Chile, nine African nations, most European countries and small islands.
A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.
UCL’s analysis said it was “reassuring” that governments which had taken strong positions in the media against the NZF were being more compromising in the negotiations.
Tweaks are probable
While there is majority support for the NZF, UCL said adopting it would be difficult politically. “The process from here could therefore be as much about producing what appears to be a new package, but one that broadly ends up with similar outcomes in relation to objectives,” UCL argued.
But tweaking the NZF, which resulted from years of negotiations, comes with risks, it warned. For example, changes could reduce the new system’s planned support for low-income countries, turning them against it. Fenton said compromising should not mean “abandoning the principle of justice in the maritime transition”.
UCL said the speed at which shipowners must reduce their ships’ emissions or face fees is likely to be reduced in the short-term but raised in the long-term to meet a goal of net zero emissions by mid-century.
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This was a compromise put forward by NZF-supporter Brazil. However, an analysis by the the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) has found that this change would lead to more overall emissions than the original NZF trajectory.
UCL has warned it could incentivise liquefied natural gas as a shipping fuel over greener options, which include hydrogen-based methanol and ammonia.
Analysis by UCL and the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that, while a slower start to the NZF would reduce transport costs in the short term, it would increase them later due to the costs involved in switching the industry over from more polluting fuel to cleaner fuel.
NZF won’t meet emissions goals
IMarEst’s analysis finds that even in its current form – the most ambitious deal on the table – the NZF will not be sufficient for shipping to meet its emissions reduction goals.
It says that only a Pacific proposal to place a levy on ships’ total emissions – rather than just those above a certain level – would meet the industry’s targets to reduce emissions 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reach net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”. This is highly unlikely to be adopted.
Additional talks will be held from November 23-27 and from November 30-December 3 before a potentially final round of official negotiations begins on December 4.
The post London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate Change
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
At a key leaders’ summit in Palau, Pacific island nations burdened by worsening climate change impacts and costly fossil fuel imports called for November’s COP31 climate summit to deliver finance to help the region transition to renewable energy and build more resilient communities.
Heads of government from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – which includes COP31 co-president Australia – met in Palau’s capital Koror for a week-long summit, where they demanded access to climate finance, ocean action and a regional boost for renewables at COP31.
Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Jr. said during a plenary session that the Pacific must focus on delivering climate and ocean commitments. “It will require greater regional leadership, stronger regional coordination and, above all, unity of purpose,” he said.
The meeting, which ended last Friday, was marked by the absence of some leaders – among them the heads of state of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, which will host a preparatory session for COP31 in October (referred to as the pre-COP31). There were also tensions over Taiwan’s participation, with China objecting to its presence as an observer.
The forum’s final declaration, published after it ended and signed by all its members, reaffirms that climate change is the “single greatest threat to the security, livelihoods and wellbeing of Pacific peoples”, and notes “the importance of a focused, high-level declaration” at the pre-COP31 to build “political momentum towards COP31”.
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Australia and Pacific islands have invited world leaders to attend the pre-COP31 gathering, which will be held in Fiji and Tuvalu from October 5 to 8. While usually a technical meeting for negotiators, the island nations aim to issue a political declaration at the gathering calling for strong outcomes in Türkiye.
Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate minister and COP31 president of negotiations, said in a speech during the Pacific forum that his country is “determined to use COP31 to progress the agenda to make it easier for countries to access the climate finance they need”.
“We won’t miss the opportunity to ensure COP31 is a Pacific COP. Not just because of the location of pre-COP but because of the agenda we are shaping through the Action Agenda at COP31,” he said.
The Action Agenda is a large portfolio of climate initiatives and coalitions uniting governments, businesses and civil society outside of the formal negotiations on everything from health to methane emissions.
Renewable energy investment plan
Announced a year ago, the island nations launched a $14-billion investment plan for a “100% Renewable Blue Pacific” at the forum in Palau. The plan lists strategic projects that would reduce the region’s high dependence on fossil fuel imports, whose soaring costs have become a major burden since the Iran war.
The projects include a $52-million programme managed by Australia to develop off-grid renewables in remote communities across the Pacific, as well as a $100-million blended finance fund aimed at supporting private-sector investments in wind and solar, among others.
Currently, some countries in the Pacific are spending up to a quarter of their GDP importing diesel to power electricity generation, according to a new report by the University of New South Wales in Australia. The investment plan launched at the forum aims to reduce these costs by adding 2.2 gigawatts of renewable generation and around 9 gigawatt hours of electricity storage.
To channel funds into the region, the plan also highlights the role of the recently established Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), a regional fund that seeks to swiftly disburse funds to climate-vulnerable communities at the local level. Bowen said he would promote the facility to world leaders attending COP31 and “ask for their support”.
Call to transition away from fossil fuels
Separately, the forum endorsed the Belau Declaration which emphasises the need to keep the 1.5C Paris Agreement temperature goal alive. A UN report last week showed that overshooting this limit is now inevitable, but deep emissions cuts could still bring global temperatures back down by the end of the century.
Pacific nations expect to rally support for this declaration at the pre-COP, with Fiji’s climate minister Lynda Tabuya saying in a statement: “Palau is where we build the political mandate. Pre-COP is where we take it to the world.”
The political declaration also says that countries must accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels “towards a renewable energy future”, and calls for greater recognition of the importance of ocean health in addressing climate change.
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As part of the forum’s outcomes in Palau, countries also noted Tuvalu’s efforts to host the second global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will gather government representatives in April next year to follow up on this year’s inaugural conference in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Speaking to journalists at the forum, Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu questioned Australia’s role in talks about phasing out fossil fuels at COP31, adding that “the very least a country like Australia should be doing is stopping future expansion, and it’s not doing that”. During the PIF, the country approved the extension of a major mine that digs and exports coal for steel-making, giving it permission to keep producing until 2055.
Rising seas trigger “development emergency”
As leaders met in one of the world’s regions most threatened by sea-level rise, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a new report warning that rising seas are now “one of the most profound threats to populations around the world in developed and developing states alike”.
Presenting the report at UN headquarters in New York, Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development Navid Hanif said rising sea levels are not a “future risk any more” but an accelerating “development emergency” that could hinder progress in vulnerable regions like the Pacific and least developed countries.
The report warns that seas are rising “faster than at any point in recorded history”, with 2024 setting a new record of 5.9 millimetres. This has been driven by human-induced climate change mainly through a process known as thermal expansion – where rising heat causes the ocean to expand – as well as the melting of ice sheets.
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The report notes that about 1.2 billion people around the world are exposed to coastal flooding, and says some low-lying islands in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Fiji are already facing forced relocations. Globally, rising seas could cost more than $1 trillion every year by 2050, it adds.
“We cannot stop sea level rise this century but we can determine how much worse it becomes. About half a metre of sea level rise is already locked in in this century because of warming that has already occurred, but beyond that our choices matter enormously,” Hanif told journalists.
Bill Hare, CEO of think-tank Climate Analytics, said the report was a “wake-up call” to the leaders of high-emitting countries that their failure to cut carbon emissions is “creating major risks for the future alongside the impacts we can already observe around us”.
Guterres is set to host a high-level meeting on addressing the threat of sea level rise this month during the UN General Assembly, where countries are expected to adopt a declaration that calls for stronger action, expanded access to finance and “ongoing dialogue” to tackle the issue.
The post At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance appeared first on Climate Home News.
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
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