Global leaders are being urged to take immediate steps to combat climate change with the issue set to be a major point of discussion at the United Nations this week. “I’m not desperate, but I’m tremendously worried,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a weekend interview. “We are on the verge of the abyss and we cannot afford a step in the wrong direction.” Guterres and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are hosting a closed-door session on Monday with 35 to 40 world leaders to get countries to do more ahead of climate change negotiations in Scotland. On Friday, United States President Joe Biden convened a private forum to push world leaders for bigger emission cuts and aid to poorer countries for developing cleaner energy.

“We are rapidly running out of time,” Guterres said at the forum, expressing apprehensions of “high risk of failure” of negotiations in Glasgow.

The renewed focus on climate change comes in a year marked by disasters related to extreme weather, including devastating wildfires and tropical cyclones and deadly heat waves and flooding in the US, China, Europe, and elsewhere.

Experts say China and America’s pledges for emission cuts or financial help during the UN sessions would pave the way for an climate change agreement in Glasgow. Guterres, however, is worried that ties between the two global powers are “totally dysfunctional.”

Nigel Purvis, a former US State Department climate negotiator and CEO of the private firm Climate Advisers, said the Glasgow meeting was not shaping up to be as well politically prepared as the Paris conference was in 2015. Pete Ogden, vice president of the United Nations Foundation for Energy and Climate, cited “worrying mistrust between nations at a time when greater solidarity is needed.”

Biden, world leaders try to hammer out next steps on climate

The UN meeting will coincide with Climate Week in New York City which will see activists, government leaders and business officials pitch for more climate change action.

UN climate conference chief Patricia Espinosa said Friday G-20 countries must fulfill responsibility towards reducing carbon emissions as her agency announced that pledges for the Scotland conference were falling short of the Paris goals.

A UN report on Friday showed that current pledges to cut carbon emissions set the world on a path toward 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since the pre-industrial era. “That is catastrophic,” Guterres said in the interview. “The world could not live with a 2.7-degree increase in temperature.”

(With inputs from Associated Press)