23/11/2025
For thirty years, the world has gathered arguing, negotiating, hoping to find a way out of the climate crisis.
And for ten years since the Paris Agreement, we have stood before each other and promised to keep the world below dangerous warming.
Yet as we meet here today, the storm seasons grow longer, the droughts more unforgiving, and the hopes of millions grow more fragile.
And I think of the people behind those numbers because they are not statistics to me.
They are faces. Families. Stories.
I think of the fisherman who once knew every current of his sea, now staring into waters he no longer recognizes.
I think of the farmers who wake each morning to a sun that feels less like life and more like a warning.
I think of us the young people trying to dream of a future that feels like it is slipping further from our grasp.
We know the truth.
We have known it for years: there is no safe future without a full phase-out of fossil fuels.
Not “phasing down.”
Not halfway measures.
But phasing out completely.
Every year of delay pushes communities closer to the edge. Every year we choose convenience over courage, more homes are washed away, more crops fail, more young people lose faith that the world is listening.
Continuing fossil fuel production does not simply warm the planet it fuels the storms that flood our homes, the droughts that steal our harvests, the wildfires that swallow our land, and the rising seas that erase our histories.
And these impacts do not fall equally. They fall hardest on the communities who did the least to cause this crisis,on families in the global South whose lives, livelihoods, and cultures are being torn apart by a disaster they did not create.
For decades, some countries have grown rich from oil and gas profits measured in dollars, while the costs have been paid in lost lives, uprooted families, broken ecosystems, and stolen futures.
So today, we speak plainly about what justice demands:
Those who have contributed the most to this crisis owe a massive climate debt to the global South.
