The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned today, Monday, October 3, 2022, that the world is engaged in a "life or death struggle" for survival, as it awaits an "upcoming climate chaos," and accused the world's twenty richest countries of not doing enough to prevent the planet's temperature rise.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations added that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing at an unprecedented rate, and that the time has come for a "quantum settlement" between wealthy developed countries that caused most of the greenhouse gases and emerging economies that often suffer the worst effects of those emissions.

Guterres’s remarks came as government representatives opened a meeting in the Congolese capital Kinshasa to prepare for the major UN-led climate summit in the Sharm El-Sheikh resort in Egypt next November.

This period is witnessing huge climate impacts worldwide – from floods that covered a third of Pakistan with water and the hottest summer in Europe in 500 years to hurricanes and storms sweeping across the Philippines, Cuba, and the US state of Florida.

In recent weeks, Guterres has intensified his efforts for a climate summit version demanding polluters bear the cost of what they have caused, commonly referred to as "losses and damages," and said today, Monday, that people need to act now.

He added: "Failure to act to address loss and damage will lead to further loss of trust and more climate harm.. This is an ethical duty that cannot be ignored."

Guterres said that the "COP27" summit in Egypt "must be the right place to move (and act) on loss and damage."