Secretary-General Key Moments
Landmark climate speeches and events by UN Secretary-General António Guterres
A Moment of Opportunity
22 July 2025: Underlining the importance of seizing this moment of opportunity, the Secretary-General outlines the key action areas and steps required to turbocharge a renewables revolution that can deliver clean and affordable energy for all.
Leaders’ Session on Climate and the Just Transition
23 April 2025: Our world faces massive headwinds and a multitude of crises. But we cannot allow climate commitments to be blown off course. We must keep building momentum for action at COP30 in Brazil — and today was an important part of that effort. We don’t have a moment to lose.
A Moment of Truth
5 June 2024: In a pivotal speech on World Environment Day, the UN Secretary-General set out some hard-hitting truths about the state of the climate, the grotesque risk leaders are running, and what companies and countries – particularly the G7 and the G20 – need to do over the next eighteen months to salvage humanity’s chances of a livable future.
Climate Ambition Summit 2023
20 September 2023: The UN Secretary-General’s latest report calls for a surge in investment in prevention and peacebuilding measures to address the increasing geopolitical polarization.
Informal Leaders’ Roundtable on Climate Action
21 September 2022: Countries and communities everywhere are facing pressures that are being exacerbated by megatrends – like population growth, rapid and many times chaotic urbanization, food insecurity, water scarcity, massive movements of population and migration… the list can go on and on. But one overriding megatrend is far and away at the top of that list – climate change.
Informal Leaders Roundtable on Climate Action
18 September 2021: UN Secretary-General António Guterres and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson held an informal, closed-door roundtable with a small but representative group of Heads of State and Government. The Informal Leaders Roundtable on Climate Action followed the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which signaled a “code red for humanity”.
State of the Planet
2 December 2020: The UN Secretary-General delivered a landmark speech on the state of the planet, setting the stage for dramatically scaled-up ambition on climate change over the coming year.
High-Level Climate Change Roundtable
24 September 2020: The virtual roundtable demonstrated leading examples of the Secretary-General’s six climate-positive actions to recover better together: invest in jobs and green business, no bailouts to polluting industries, ending subsidies for fossil fuels, considering climate risks in all decisions and policy-making, working together and ensuring that no one is left behind.
Climate Action Summit 2019
23 September 2019: The Climate Action Summit, and the Climate Youth Summit, succeeded in focusing the attention of world leaders, from government, the private sector and civil society, on the urgency for action to address the climate emergency, and on increasing climate action.
Informal Leaders Dialogue on Climate Change
26 September 2018: As governments prepared to meet later in the year for the next round of climate talks, Secretary-General António Guterres underscored the need to speed up action on an issue that is “the absolute priority” for the United Nations. Read the speech and an article
Remarks on Climate Change
10 September 2018: Climate change is moving faster than we are – and its speed has provoked a sonic boom SOS across our world. If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us. Watch the video.
Climate Action: Mobilizing the World
30 May 2017: Climate change is moving faster than we are – and its speed has provoked a sonic boom SOS across our world. If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us. Watch the video.