UK PM Boris Johnson opens COP26 climate summit

Glasgow: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday opened the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, with a warning about the world leaders' meeting being the world's James Bond moment to save the planet.

"It is one minute to midnight and we need to act now," Johnson said as he opened day one of the two-day World Leaders' Summit of the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow.

"We are in roughly the same position my fellow global leaders as James Bond today except that the tragedy is this is not a movie the doomsday device is real," he said, referring to the fictional spy who often ends his films fighting to stop a force from ending the world.

Johnson warned that two degrees more to global temperatures will jeopardise food supplies, three degrees more will bring more wildfires and cyclones, while four degrees and "we say goodbye to whole cities".

Alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi, around 120 world leaders have gathered for the summit to achieve a consensus on implementing the targets agreed during the COP summit held in Paris in 2015 and set ambitious targets to cut carbon emissions. Singling out some of the biggest economies of the world in the US and China.

In his address, Johnson warned that unless global temperatures are brought down towards 1.5 Celsius, the world may have to say goodbye to whole cities.

"Miami and Shanghai lost beneath the waves. The longer we fail to act, the worse it gets, and the higher the price when we are eventually forced by catastrophe to act because humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change, he warned.

His keynote address was followed by an address by Prince Charles, an avid environmentalist, who called on the world's decision-makers to find innovative solutions to the climate crisis.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday met Johnson on the sidelines of the COP26 climate summit here and discussed ways to enhance bilateral cooperation in areas like green hydrogen, renewables and clean technology, economy and defence.

President Joe Biden urged world leaders to the meet the challenge of global warming, saying there is no more time to hang back or argue amongst ourselves about the peril facing the planet.