United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urged the world’s most polluting countries to tackle the risks posed by climbing ocean levels.
“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 during a press conference in Tonga on Tuesday.
The island nation’s capital of Nuku’alofa is hosting the Pacific Islands Forum, a decades-old gathering centered on addressing the climate crisis.
After calling for an SOS, or “save our seas,” Guterres urged world leaders to drastically cut their planet-warming pollution and act on pledges made at last year’s U.N. climate talks to shift away from fossil fuels and triple clean energy capacity. He also called for a massive spending boost to protect vulnerable communities from a hotter planet.
