The head of the Maldives delegation to the United Nations climate conference has questioned the point of the yearly summits, saying they are failing to produce meaningful results.
Former President Mohamed Nasheed attended the 24th edition of the UN talks, being held this year in Poland and set to end today. After almost two weeks of talks, negotiators from almost 200 countries struggled to agree on the rules for implementing the 2015 treaty from Paris on fighting global warming treaty.
"What's the point" of having such negotiations if they don't lead to progress or solutions to problems that are related to the lives of people worldwide, Nasheed said.
"There is a view among many of us that this is failing," he said.
Nasheed said there was an urgent need to implement the Paris agreement's call for keeping global warming at no more than 1.5C during this century. Without that, he said, the existence of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, would be threatened. He said a lack of agreement in Katowice would only worsen the situation.
