There were particularly striking speeches during this COP26.

After that of the young Kenyan last week who begged the leaders of the whole world to open their hearts, it was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Tuvalu archipelago who marked the spirits on Tuesday.

Simon Kofe filmed his speech for the international climate conference literally with his feet in the water of the Pacific Ocean where his state is located.

"We're sinking, but so are the rest of the world," he said, facing his desk, his suit and tie wet to his knees.

“Climate change and rising sea levels are deadly, they are an existential threat to Tuvalu and the atoll states.

Whether we feel the impact now, as we do in Tuvalu, or in 100 years: we will all end up experiencing the appalling effects of this climate crisis one day, ”he warned.

"We are not going to wait for the world to agree to act"

On behalf of the eight islands and 12,000 inhabitants of Tuvalu, Simon Kofe calls for carbon neutrality in the middle of the century, to make the limit of warming to + 1.5 ° C "achievable", to "the urgent mobilization of the necessary climate finance. to face the damage "already suffered by a number of countries, as well as" a greater responsibility of peoples and countries in the preservation of the Earth ".

“But we are not going to wait for the world to agree to act. We are looking to the future in the face and we are preparing for the worst: the disappearance of our territory and the need for our people to leave, ”he added nonetheless. "We are seeking bold legal avenues to ensure that Tuvalu's existing maritime borders will remain intact and that we will be recognized and sovereign even as our territory has disappeared as a result of climate change."

Some 200 delegations have been looking for two weeks since the beginning of November in Glasgow, Scotland (United Kingdom), on how to limit, as provided for in the 2015 Paris agreement, global warming to well below +2 ° C, and if possible at + 1.5 ° C compared to the pre-industrial era.

Every tenth of an additional degree of warming counts and has its share of consequences, heat waves, fires or floods.

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