Small Island Nations Plead for Climate Action as Disasters Ravage Homes

As high-level ministers take over the COP30 climate negotiations, vulnerable nations are making a desperate plea for the rest of the world to take immediate action. Just three weeks ago, Jamaica was battered by the Category 5 Hurricane Melissa, causing almost $10 billion in damage and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

"Hurricane Melissa changed the life of every Jamaican in less than 24 hours," said the country's economic growth minister, Matthew Samuda. He and other representatives from small island states and impoverished nations are warning that lives are on the line, and the world's current climate plans are not strong enough to keep global warming below the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement.

Speakers at the talks are lamenting the slow progress in the negotiations, with one Cuban minister saying, "Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we had to do a long time ago." They are calling climate change a "moral duty" and a day-to-day reality, with one Romanian minister relaying the words of a flood victim: "I sit on the roof of the house all night, looking at the neighbors, thinking whether or not the water will swallow us all."

The vulnerable nations are now using a recent ruling by the International Court of Justice that climate change is an existential problem that must be fixed as leverage to speed up climate-fighting efforts at COP30.