In an ironic twist of fate, the United Nations convened its first-ever high-level plenary “Addressing the existential threats posed by Sea-level rise” just hours before Hurricane Helene flooded Florida’s northwestern coast.
With the third largest school district in the United States, and nearly 2.8 million people living near sea-level, Miami has more students facing the impacts of impending sea rise than anywhere else in the nation.
Across the globe, seas are rising faster than any time in the last 3000 years. With more than 900 million people living in coastal communities, as emissions increase, temperatures rise, glaciers melt, and oceans expand, the losses will be staggering. Rising seas will erode coastlines, destroy crops, displace millions, contaminate fresh water, damage infrastructure, and decimate economies. Yet Studies show that of all the cities in the world, Miami has the most to lose from sea level rise.
So I looked forward to what I hoped would be a breakthrough forum of progress and solutions. But as one expert after another took the stage and exposed alarming stats, my characteristic optimism faded.
Speaking on behalf of the Marshall Islands, President Hilda Heine declared that while “we are too late to prevent rising seas from eating away at our shores, we will not go silently to our watery graves.” One of the world’s lowest-lying island nations, researchers say parts of the Marshall Islands will be uninhabitable by as early as 2035.
President Sylvanie Burton of Dominica, silenced the crowd with the devastating reality faced by island states. In 2015 Tropical Storm Erika wiped out 96 per cent of Dominica’s gross domestic product (GDP); in 2017 Hurricane Maria destroyed over 225 percent of the GDP; and this year Hurricane Beryl flattened the neighboring island-nations of Grenada, Barbados, and Jamaica, and destroyed more than 90% of the homes on St. Vincent.
The comments were underscored by a report just released by NASA that for many, it is too little too late: we’ve heated the planet so much that regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions change in the coming years, we’ve likely ceded the fate of the many Island nations, where sea rise is now deemed irreversible.
And speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States, Samoa’s Prime Minister Mataʻafa lamented: “We contributed almost nothing to this global scourge, but it is our land that is being consumed by the sea.”
The United Nations Secretary-General Secretary-General António Guterres spoke of the climate inequities faced by the poorest communities. While the G20 contributes 80 percent of global emissions, millions of families in Panama, Bangladesh, and Senegal have been affected this year by the encroaching seas.
The landmark plenary was a start, laying the groundwork for loss and damage discussions to amp up at COP29, the cooperative use of innovation approaches and AI for monitoring and risk analysis, and an agreed upon Assembly declaration on sea-level rise in 2026.
But as Guterres closed his remarks with a plea that “we cannot leave the hopes and aspirations of billions of people dead in the water,” the first bands of Hurricane Helene hit my home state. Thousands of homes are already flooded, and more than 1.5 million people are without power.
The youth representing my organization, We Are Forces of Nature, leave the UNGA with a mix of hope and fear. Next up, this November we’ll head to the UN’s World Climate Conference in Azerbaijan with the hope that world leaders will come together and take action to ensure humanity’s survival.
But for some, time has already run out.
Will Charouhis is an 18-year-old climate activist. He began working to protect coastal communities in 2017 after Hurricane Irma roard up over the seawalls and flooded his hometown. Leading one of the world’s youngest non-government delegations accredited by the UNFCCC and UNEP, he is the founder of Forces of Nature, a youth-led organization aiming to slow climate change.
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