Humanity is facing a “perfect storm” of crises that is widening the inequality between North and South, the UN Secretary-General has warned. Division is not only “morally unacceptable” but also dangerous, further threatening peace and security in a conflict-ridden world.
The global food, energy and financial crisis unleashed by the war in Ukraine has hit countries already reeling from the pandemic and climate crisis, reversing what had been a growing rapprochement between developed and developing countries, Antonio Guterres said.
“Inequalities are still growing within countries, but they are now growing in a morally unacceptable way between North and South, and this is creating a divide that can be very dangerous in terms of peace and security.”
Guterres, speaking to the Guardian at the UN Oceans Conference in his home city of Lisbon in Portugal this week, said his biggest concern was how global problems were widening the gap between rich and poor.
“The worrying thing is that we are living in a perfect storm. Because all crises contribute to the dramatic increase in inequality in the world and to a serious deterioration of the living conditions of the most vulnerable groups of the population.
“All this escalated a situation in which a world that appeared to be converging between developing and developed countries, even as inequality grew in countries north and south.” Now we’re back to drifting.”
Earlier this month, the head of the UN’s World Food Program warned that dozens of countries dependent on wheat from Russia and Ukraine risked protests, riots and political violence as world food prices soared.
Of all the crises facing the world, the climate crisis was the most important, Guterres said.
“That’s why it’s so troubling that the war in Ukraine has largely sidelined climate action. We must do everything in our power to put climate back at the top of our collective agenda. More than the planet, the human species is also at risk.
Antonio Guterres is speaking at the UN Oceans Conference in Lisbon this week. Photo: Pedro Nunes/Reuters
While many important topics were addressed at the UN Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow last November, the main question of how to reduce emissions was not seriously discussed and continues to be ignored, he said. There was agreement, he said, that to keep warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, deep emissions cuts of 45% were needed by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. But we were moving in the wrong direction, he added .
“The truth is that if we look at the national determined contributions that we have today and what was announced before during and immediately after the Cop, we are still moving towards a 14% increase in emissions.”
“We run the risk of sleepwalking into killing 1.5C goal.
“Something is being done, but it is too little too late. If we want to keep 1.5 alive, we must have a huge determination to reduce emissions as quickly as possible.
All indicators show that the effects of the climate crisis are accelerating faster than the worst predictions of a few years ago, he said.
Earlier this month, Guterres attacked fossil fuel companies, describing them and the banks that finance them as people with “humanity up to their throats” and criticized governments that have failed to rein in fossil fuels and in many cases sought to increase production gas, oil and even coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Asked about the backsliding by EU countries that announced plans to reopen coal-fired power plants in response to Russian restrictions on gas flows to Europe, Guterres said: “Coal is the number one enemy of climate action.”
The UN Secretary-General has called on Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries to phase out all coal-fired power plants by 2030, and other countries by 2040.
“I hope these examples of countries burning coal will be for a very short period,” he said
Germany, a country heavily dependent on Russian gas, has announced it will reopen shuttered coal plants to preserve its supplies, following Russia’s restrictions on gas flows. France has signaled that it may reopen a coal station due to the situation in Ukraine.
Guterres said the war has highlighted our dependence on fossil fuels. “It is the volatility of the fossil fuel market that creates these dramatic impacts in rising energy prices and contributes to rising food prices and the extremely difficult financial situation of many developing countries.” If the world had invested massively, as it should have done over the last decade, in renewable energy sources, we would be in a completely different situation today. We must learn from the past, he said.
At the UN conference attended by global leaders and heads of state, leaders of small island developing nations such as Palau, Fiji and Tonga spoke about the devastating impact on their countries of increasing typhoons and rising sea levels. Vanuatu’s Climate Change Minister Silas Boule Melwe has said the climate crisis is the biggest threat to the country’s efforts to expand its blue economy.
On Monday, Guterres declared that the world was in the midst of an “ocean emergency” and condemned the “selfishness” of some countries that were hindering efforts to reach a long-awaited treaty to protect the world’s oceans.
A long-standing pledge made in 2009 and brought to the fore at Cop26 by rich countries to provide £100 billion a year in climate finance to the developing world has yet to be fulfilled.
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Although this funding was a fraction of what was needed, the failure to keep the promise to provide it year after year added to the divide between rich and poor countries, Guterres said. That “probably won’t happen in 2022,” he added. “It makes developing countries feel that there really isn’t a strong commitment to solidarity.” Small Island Developing States feel it particularly intensely.
“There is a risk that the next cop will be negatively influenced by this disenchantment of developing countries and the lack of confidence and trust in the seriousness of the support of the developed world.” And that would be tragic because we really need to mobilize everyone. We need everyone involved if we want to keep 1.5C alive.”
Asked what gives him hope, Guterres said he met many young people in Lisbon, part of a youth forum aimed at developing ideas for solutions to ocean and climate emergencies. Their depth of knowledge, clarity, commitment in their proposals and their enthusiasm “is my greatest hope,” he said.
“Young people are engaged. We are seeing more and more cities, more and more civil society and even more areas of the private sector that are engaged. Governments are now probably becoming the slower moving entities.
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