Deliver on promises

A crucial UN conference heard calls on its first day for the world's major economies to keep their promises of financial help to address the climate crisis.

The task facing negotiators at the start of the two-week COP26 summit in the Scottish city of Glasgow was made even more daunting by the failure of the Group of 20 major industrial nations to agree ambitious new commitments at the weekend.

"The animals are disappearing, the rivers are dying and our plants don't flower like they did before. The Earth is speaking. She tells us that we have no more time," Txai Surui, a 24-year-old indigenous youth leader from the Amazon rain forest, told the opening ceremony in Glasgow.

COP26 aims to keep alive a target of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

To do that, it needs to secure more ambitious pledges to reduce emissions, lock in billions in climate financing for developing countries, and finish the rules for implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, which was signed by nearly 200 countries.

The pledges made so far would allow the planet's average surface temperature to rise 2.7C this century, which the United Nations says would supercharge the destruction that climate change is already causing.

In 2009, the developed countries most responsible for global warming pledged to provide $100 billion per year by 2020 to help developing nations deal with its consequences. Developed nations confirmed last week they would be three years late in meeting the $100 billion climate finance pledge - which many poor countries and activists say is insufficient anyway.

Leaders of countries such as Kenya, Bangladesh, Barbados and Malawi called rich nations to task for failing to deliver.

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley compared the vast sums pumped into the global economy by rich countries' central banks in recent years with those spent on climate help.

"Can there be peace and prosperity if one-third of the world lives in prosperity and two-thirds lives under seas and face calamitous threats to our wellbeing?" she said.