Rome:
Some of the world’s smallest nations could “disappear” devoid of action at an upcoming UN summit to include climate transform, the secretary common of the Commonwealth warned in a Wednesday interview.
“The threat to the 42 small states in existential,” Baroness Patricia Scotland told AFP. “People say that as if it does not mean what it says — namely these small states will disappear.”
The Dominica-born lawyer and former British government minister, who leads the Commonwealth association of former nations of the British empire, was speaking in the course of a pay a visit to to Rome that integrated talks with Pope Francis.
She mentioned some of the Commonwealth’s smallest members, like the low-lying Pacific islands of Tuvalu and Nauru, had been “looking for new places to go” for the reason that “the sea level rises are so dangerous now”.
She also decried the devastating effect of more frequent hurricanes, which includes in her native nation.
“Dominica usually looks like a Garden of Eden,” she mentioned. But soon after 2017’s Hurricane Maria “even the bark of trees had been stripped, there was not one green leaf left. It was like Armageddon”.
UN climate talks in the Scottish city of Glasgow from October 31 to November 12 are aimed at securing a worldwide deal on decarbonising world economies and charting humanity’s path away from catastrophic worldwide warming.
Ms Scotland insisted that humanity had “no choice” but to act, noting that poor nations exposed to climate transform also want substantial debt and vaccine relief.
“We are all in the same storm, but we’re definitely not all in the same boat,” she mentioned.
The Commonwealth brings with each other 54 nations and 2.6 billion individuals, and the baroness is its initial female leader.
Her term was supposed to finish in 2010, but a summit to make a decision regardless of whether to reappoint her or replace her has been postponed twice due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I certainly have so much work still to do that I would very much expect to still be in my position, but it is a matter for member states to decide,” she mentioned.
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