The head of the Maldives delegation to the U.N. climate conference questioned on Thursday the point of the yearly summits, saying they are failing to produce meaningful results.
Former President Mohamed Nasheed attended the 24th edition of the U.N. talks, being held this year in Poland and set to end Friday. After almost two weeks of talks, negotiators from almost 200 countries have not yet agreed 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 in an interview with The Associated Press.
Nasheed said there is an urgent need to implement the Paris agreement's call for keeping global warming at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) during this century. Without that, he said, the existence of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, will be threatened.
He said a lack of agreement in Katowice would only worsen the situation.
He said the thousands-year-old nations in the Indian Ocean want to live "in our own homelands, we want to live with our communities with our culture, with our people."
"We don't think that this is asking for much," Nasheed said. "We are just only saying: Please do not kill us."