UN climate talks leader says financial help for poor nations is urgent goal of negotiations
The head of upcoming climate negotiations is telling world leaders that a new financial aid package for poor and disaster-struck nations is the urgent and make-or-break goal of United Nations talks this fall
The head of upcoming climate negotiations told world leaders Wednesday that a new financial aid package for poor and disaster-struck nations is the urgent, make-or-break goal of United Nations talks this fall.
“Time lost is lives, livelihoods and the planet lost,” said Mukhtar Babayev, the Azerbaijan ecology minister and president-designate of November climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan.
At the same time, Simon Stiell, the United Nations’ top climate official, made an emotional plea for a stepped-up fight against “the growing cost of unchecked climate carnage ” from his hurricane-demolished hometown of Carriacou, Grenada, in some of the first video from the devastated island.
“Beryl is yet more painful proof,” Stiell, executive secretary of the UN's climate agency, said from the remnants of a neighbor's house that had lost its roof and walls. “Every year fossil fuel-driven climate costs are an economic wrecking ball hitting billions of households and small businesses. If governments everywhere don't step up, every economy and 8 billion people will face this blunt-force trauma head-on on a continuous basis.”
Beryl, a record-breaking storm that rapidly intensified, destroyed or severely damaged 98% of the island's homes with “devastation that has become all too familiar to hundreds of millions of people all around the world," Stiell said.
He noted this year's four-figure death toll from heat in India, more than 1,000 dead from heat in Saudi Arabia during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and millions of people left
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