UN General Assembly
2017

While the Paris Agreement was a historic diplomatic achievement, we must remember that we remain well off track for achieving its central goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C. Failure to achieve that goal would be devastating for small islands, but we should not pretend that any additional warming is safe. Negative impacts in the form of superstorms, irregular rain patterns and heatwaves are here with us now and will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future. As I said at last year’s World Humanitarian Summit, all of us must face up to some very difficult questions. How will we feed a planet of 9 billion people when crop yields are projected to fall? How will we share declining freshwater resources as glaciers disappear and drought becomes commonplace in many regions? How will we protect the millions who are rendered homeless when low-lying coastal areas are inundated? How can those and many other challenges be managed effectively so that we can avoid breakdowns in governance and a proliferation of failed States?