Island states call for emissions cuts, climate funding at COP31

The world can no longer treat the 1.5-de­gree Cel­sius warm­ing thresh­old as a dis­tant warn­ing, with small is­land de­vel­op­ing states (SIDS) urg­ing gov­ern­ments at COP31 to con­front the like­li­hood of glob­al tem­per­a­ture over­shoot through stronger emis­sions-re­duc­tion com­mit­ments, in­creased cli­mate fi­nanc­ing and ac­cel­er­at­ed adap­ta­tion mea­sures.

Ruean­na Haynes, deputy lead cli­mate change ne­go­tia­tor for the Al­liance of Small Is­land States (AO­SIS), said this year’s Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence comes at a crit­i­cal junc­ture, as the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty faces the in­creas­ing­ly cer­tain prospect of ex­ceed­ing the 1.5C lim­it es­tab­lished un­der the Paris Agree­ment.

Haynes said COP31, be­ing held in An­talya, Türkiye, must show that coun­tries are pre­pared to re­spond mean­ing­ful­ly to the con­se­quences of decades of in­suf­fi­cient cli­mate ac­tion.