Outgoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres closed his decade in office with a direct challenge to world leaders. He urged them to adopt binding fossil fuel phase-out timelines or watch the 1.5°C target slip further out of reach. Guterres spoke at a climate event during the UN General Assembly’s high-level week in New York on 22 September. He called on every government to publish a national transition plan away from coal, oil and gas. Each plan, he said, needed clear dates and protections for workers whose livelihoods depend on those industries.
It was the first time in his tenure that Guterres made such an explicit, universal demand. He argued that the economics of the transition have already turned in favour of clean energy. Renewables, he told delegates, are now the cheapest, fastest, and most secure source of new electricity almost everywhere. Only a handful of governments, among them France, Germany and the Netherlands, have so far published such roadmaps, each targeting an end to fossil fuel use by mid-century.
Guterres paired that call with a demand that fossil fuel producers cover the cost of the damage their emissions have caused, rather than leaving the bill to taxpayers. Fossil fuel interests will not step aside on their own, he said. For decades, Big Oil has treated the atmosphere as an open sewer, and cashed in on the consequences. He pointed to windfall profits recorded since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted energy markets, and urged G20 economies, which produce most global emissions, to lead the shift.
Polluters pay meets loss and damage
The polluters pay framing carries particular weight for the Global South, where floods, droughts and cyclones linked to warming have outpaced the finance available for recovery. Guterres reiterated calls for developed countries to mobilise at least $300 billion a year for developing nations. That figure forms part of a broader push to scale total climate finance to $1.3 trillion annually by 2035. Vulnerable states have long argued that such funding is an obligation rather than a favour. At the same event, Nepal’s foreign minister went further, calling financial support for climate-hit countries a legal and moral liability.
Guterres also pressed for faster progress on adaptation. He highlighted an initiative to extend early-warning systems to every country by the end of 2027. A separate effort would expand electricity grids across Africa and Southeast Asia, where power access remains patchy despite renewable potential. A new task force on critical minerals needed for batteries and grids was announced too, aimed at stopping the transition from simply shifting extraction pressures onto mineral-rich developing countries.
Guterres warned that global emissions are still rising even as clean technology becomes cheaper, calling the gap between falling costs and rising output incompatible with the world’s stated climate goals. G20 members, whose economies generate the large majority of global emissions, remain the group whose choices will decide whether the 1.5°C goal survives this decade.
A legacy handed to Belem and beyond
Guterres leaves office as the world temporarily exceeds 1.5°C of warming and extreme weather intensifies across multiple continents. His successor inherits both the unfinished push for fossil fuel phase-out timelines and the fight over who pays for climate damage already done. Turkey and Australia are set to co-host the next UN climate summit, COP31, in November, where negotiators will face renewed pressure to convert this week’s rhetoric into binding commitments. We are the first generation with the tools to end the fossil fuel age, and the last who can avert climate catastrophe, Guterres told the assembly, framing the transition as a closing window rather than a distant goal.
