It is an honour to address you today at this high-level plenary meeting focused on a crisis that poses an existential threat to our world. As we gather during the high-level week of the 79th session of the General Assembly, we come together to not only to discuss this critical issue of rising sea levels, but to reaffirm our collective responsibility to act and act swiftly.

As we are gathered here today, we are witnessing the global temperature exceeding the 1.5 degree threshold for the first time. The rapid cuts in emissions we as the developing nations have called for to avoid 1.5 °C of global warming have not occurred. At the current rates of emissions, we will burn through the carbon budget that will still give us a chance to stay below this limit within five years.

The implications for sea-level rise are dire. We stand a good chance of triggering the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and worse, triggering the irreversible melting of the West Antarctic ice-sheet. The sea-level rise triggered today will commit future generations to literally live in a 'smaller' world, and we will be known as the generation that stole living space from future generations.

This is already impacting on us today, and will increasingly do so during the 21st century. Under the low-mitigation futures, sea-level rise will be in the order of 1 m this century. This will displace hundreds of millions of people from where they live in the world's coastal areas, today – most of these people being from the developing nations. My own continent Africa will be dramatically affected. By 2030, 108–116 million people in Africa will be exposed to sea-level rise, increasing to 190–245 million by 2060.

Even closer to home, Southern Africa is a region where millions of people live in informal settlements located in areas exposed to sea-level rise and accompanying floods and storm surges. This brings immense vulnerability. I recall the human tragedy of March 2019 in southern Africa, when more than 1500 people died in the landfall of intense tropical cyclone Idai – most of them in Mozambique. This was the first time that a tropical cyclone killed more than a thousand people in Africa in recorded history.

What must we do? The starting point is to substantially improve the adequacy of human settlements, including urban infrastructure and social support systems, and other adaptation measures, and the multilateral cooperation necessary to implement these. We need effective early warning systems, including the great UN Early Warnings for All initiative, and we need the new loss and damage fund to get to work.

I thank you.

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