THE news from New York is not good. On Sunday, as world leaders arrived for the 79th session of the UN General Assembly that was set to begin on Tuesday, UN Secretary General António Guterres inaugurated the Summit for the Future. The Summit for the Future is supposed to be a quasi-climate summit that is meant to jump-start the stalled progress over climate change. It took only a day, however, for world leaders to begin to warn that the distance between the countries was growing. As the UN chief put it, “crises are interacting and feeding off each other — for example, as digital technologies spread climate disinformation, that deepens distrust and fuels polarisation”.
It is true that the urgency of climate change is impressing itself on some countries far more than on others. Take, for instance, the case of Jakarta in Indonesia, which is perhaps the fastest sinking city in the world. In 2022, when world leaders gathered at the climate summit in Egypt, António Guterres had a message for them: “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact — or a Collective Suicide Pact.”
The case of Jakarta is particularly pertinent here as an example of how climate change is already causing enormous change in the lives of people living in the Global South. Jakarta suffers from a tragic confluence of environmental and climate-related issues. Rising sea levels, poor air quality, and huge amounts of rainfall have all coalesced to cause a situation where large parts of the city are........