UN secretary general urges world leaders to take climate threat seriously: ‘We are still not doing enough’

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning to world leaders gathered in Poland for a conference on global warming, saying that they are not doing “enough” to combat climate change.

In his remarks opening the COP24 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland, Guterres told attendees that climate change is “the most important issue we face” globally.

“Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption,” Guterres said, according to The Associated Press.

{mosads}He also told those gathered that climate change is already “a matter of life and death” for many nations, according to the BBC.

Representatives from about 200 countries kicked off two weeks of climate change talks on Sunday.

Naturalist Sir David Attenborough also spoke at the opening of the conference, saying: “If we don’t take action [on climate change], the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

The meetings mark the first gathering of signatories of the Paris Climate Accord since the U.N. released a report warning of impending climate-related devastation.

President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Obama-era Paris agreement early in his presidency, and was the sole leader at the G-20 conference in Argentina over the weekend not to affirm support for the pact.