Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, remarks at WHO press conference ahead of COP27 on climate change and food insecurity

Wednesday, 2 November

As delivered

Thank you very much indeed, Dr. Tedros, it’s a great honour to be with you today on this extremely important subject of climate change and food insecurity. Thank you for having me.

The world is indeed in the grip of a hunger crisis among its many other crises.

War, the pandemic, and vast inequality are all partly to blame.

The emergency signs flash red everywhere. And like you, Dr. Tedros, I see the consequences of all this nearly everywhere we visit.

In the Horn of Africa - as I know Nimo [Hassan] will tell us more - an unprecedented drought has pushed 22 million people to the edge of famine.

And like you, Tedros, I hope that we hear good news from South Africa for the people of Tigray very soon.

I’ve visited with communities in Somalia and Kenya whose very way of life – pastoralism – is threatened, existentially, by the continuing droughts, which kill off livestock, three million livestock dead in Somalia alone in the recent months.

I was also in Pakistan last month where a monstruous monsoon - what Secretary-General Guterres called a “monsoon on steroids” - wiped out four-fifths of the country’s livestock. The consequences for people whose livelihoods depend on that, as in the Horn of Africa, are hard to imagine.

Extreme heat is destroying crops from South America to China and undercutting, again, people’s livelihoods and access to food.

Hotter, more acidic oceans are annihilating marine life, a major source of protein for billions of people.

And as crops fail and food in today’s geopolitics becomes too expensive, millions of people are being driven from their homes and deeper and deeper into poverty.

We only have to note the changes in the prices of wheat over these last three or four days as a result of the turbulence in the Black Sea grain export operation.

This is a world at 1.2 degrees Celsius. But we are on track to double that.

Unless we act now, we are heading for a future full of drought, disease and climate disaster.

Across the whole world now, up to 222 million people face high levels of acute food insecurity, barely able to eat a meal a day. And more than 45 million people – the numbers are staggering – are on the brink of starvation.

Our system, the humanitarian system, is strained. We have an annual cost at the moment of about US$50 billion for global humanitarian response plans. We have received now, in November of the year, about $20 billion dollars. That does not even begin to cope with the escalating impact of the climate emergency.

That’s why, when world leaders meet in Egypt in a few days, as you’ve said, Tedros, they must deliver on their promises.

And we remember the promise made in 2009 [by] the leaders of the G20, to commit US$100 billion a year in climate money.

If you go to Somalia, for example, or even across most of Africa, you look in vain for any of that money having come through for the people of Somalia, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and elsewhere. That money is not just missing – we don’t know where it is and how it is decided upon, how it is spent. We need to come out of COP27 with clarity and accountability for that.

My Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called for a windfall tax on the profits that oil and gas companies made this year. OXFAM, I think, has estimated that – is it 11 or 18 days of the profits of the fossil fuel majors – could pay for the cost of humanitarian catastrophes around the world.

So we need to end to fossil fuel subsidies, we need debt relief for nations in dire need. We need that climate money to be applied as grants, not as loans, to those countries in need, now, so that we can, not only bring people back to life, but bring them resilience and alternative livelihoods.

The COP is going to be a major test for all of us to see if those commitments, made so boldly in years gone past, finally may land for the people who are staring the climate future in the face.

Tedros, I want to thank you for inviting me to this important conference. Let us hope that next week, in Sharm el-Sheik, we will see real progress.

Thank you.