“Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects. Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods. Sweltering temperatures spawning disease,” he said in a speech to open the Climate Ambition Summit, happening alongside the UN General Assembly in New York .
“Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge,” he added, warning that if nothing changes we are heading “towards a dangerous and unstable world.”

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres issued a stark warning as he gathered world leaders for a high-level summit on the climate crisis : “Humanity has opened the gates to hell.” Wednesday’s summit is unusual due to Guterres’ decision to restrict the speaker list to countries he deemed to have clear and effective climate plans, and those prepared to send a high-level leader to speak.
Of the nearly 200 countries present in New York for the General Assembly, only 34 nations and seven non-governmental bodies secured speaking slots at the UN chief’s summit.
Notably absent from the speaker list were some of the world’s biggest polluters, including China, India and the United States, (COMPLETELY LEFT OUT AFRICA WHO DOESN’T CONTRIBUTE TO CLIMATE CHANGE) though US climate envoy John Kerry is attending.