Major polluting nations including the United States are facing new calls to pay for their role in causing the climate crisis. At a major summit in the Pacific, the message from low-lying Tuvalu was: “If you pollute, you should pay.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres spoke in Tonga and said ocean temperatures are rising in the Pacific Islands at three times the rate worldwide.

Secretary-General António Guterres: “The world must look to the Pacific and listen to science. This is a crazy situation. Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making, a crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety. But if we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves. The world must act and answer the SOS before it’s too late.”