UN chief says rising seas a ‘death sentence’ for some countries

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned of the threat posed by rising sea levels to hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas and small island states as new data reveals seas have risen rapidly since 1900.

In a stark address to the first UN Security Council debate on the implications of rising sea levels for international peace and security, Guterres said countries such as Bangladesh, China, India and the Netherlands were threatened as were big cities such as Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Lagos, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Maputo, New York and Shanghai.

“The danger is especially acute for nearly 900 million people who live in coastal zones at low elevations — that’s one out of 10 people on Earth,” he told the council on Tuesday.

Climate change is heating the planet and melting glaciers and ice sheets which, according to NASA, has resulted in Antarctica shedding some 150 billion tonnes of ice mass each year on average, Guterres said. Greenland’s ice cap is shrinking even faster and losing 270 billion tonnes per year.

“The global ocean has warmed faster over the past century than at any time in the past 11,000 years,” the UN chief said.

“Our world is hurtling past the 1.5-degree warming limit that a liveable future requires and, with present policies, is careening towards 2.8 degrees – a death sentence for vulnerable countries,” he said.