UN Chief Says Humanity Missed 1.5°C Climate Target; Bill Gates Calls To Redirect Climate Funds

Last Updated:October 28, 2025, 20:31 IST

UN warns Cop30 that humanity will overshoot the 1.5C Paris target while Bill Gates urges shifting focus from climate change to disease and hunger relief.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Image Credit: Reuters)

Ahead of Cop30 climate summit, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has warned that humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C. Meanwhile, Billionaire investor and philanthropist Bill Gates has called for resources be shifted away from the battle against climate change.

The Guardian quoted Guterres as saying that it is now “inevitable" that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement, with “devastating consequences" for the world.

He urged the leaders to realise that the longer it takes to cut emissions the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points" in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans.

“Let’s recognise our failure," he told the Guardian and Amazon-based news organisation Sumaúma. “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs."

He further said that the priority at Cop30 was to shift direction: “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible."

Meanwhile, Bill Gates, who has been an activist for carbon emissions reductions, has published an essay on Tuesday arguing that resources must be shifted away from the battle against climate change and towards preventing disease and hunger.

CNN quoted him as saying that climate change is not going to wipe out humanity and past efforts that strive for achieving zero carbon emissions have made real progress.

“Climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems," Gates wrote. “We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause."

He further said: “Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise."

“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries," he said.

US President Donald Trump-led administration has removed USAID, an international aid organisation that supplied foreign countries $8 billion as annual support to provide food and medicine to people who otherwise lack access to those life-saving necessities.

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