Poor nations are pressuring their wealthy counterparts at the UN climate summit to pay up for the mounting damage being caused by global warming, pointing to increasing powerful storms, cyclones, droughts and floods afflicting their people.

The campaign being waged at the UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland seeks hundreds of billions of dollars per year more for climate-vulnerable economies even as they struggle to access some $100 billion pledged by world powers years ago.

Those previously promised funds, meant to help developing nations transition off fossil fuels and adapt to the future realities of a warmer world, were offered in recognition that poorer countries are least responsible for climate change.

"We've been too slow on mitigation and adaption, and so now we have this big and growing problem of loss and damage," said Harjeet Singh, an advisor with Climate Action Network, who is involved in the negotiations on behalf of developing countries.

He said negotiations so far were focused on including language about "loss and damage" in the official text of the summit agreement, a request that he said was facing resistance from the United States, the European Union and other developed countries worried by the potential costs and legal implications.

Asked whether the European Union should consider a loss and damage fund separate from funding for mitigation and adaptation, Juergen Zattler, head of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, said he believed the question was premature.

"I don't think the discussion is at that stage yet," he told reporters at the Glasgow summit. "We do not know yet what loss and damage actually is, how it is different from adaptation. We are poking in the dark here."

EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans told reporters the bloc supported efforts to "get money where it needs to be as quickly as possible" but that work still needed to be done to get the details right.

A representative of the US delegation at the conference did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, an updated UN assessment said yesterday that new national emissions-cutting pledges -- including a vow last week by India to be carbon neutral by 2070 -- are likely to have a minimal effect on temperature rises this century.

In its annual Emissions Gap report last month, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) had said current decarbonisation plans -- known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs -- put the world on track to warm 2.7C this century.

It warned that countries needed to slash emissions more than seven times faster to keep warming in line with 1.5C, the most ambitious Paris Agreement temperature goal.

In an updated assessment, UNEP said yesterday that, even when new pledges were factored in, the effect on the climate is predicted to be "very similar" to existing net-zero plans, reports AFP.

This is due to "limited changes to 2030 emissions," UNEP said.

EXTREME HEAT

At the COP26 climate summit, scientists said a billion people will be affected by extreme heat stress if the climate crisis raises the global temperature by just 2C, which would be a 15-fold increase on the numbers exposed today.

According to research released by the UK Met Office, if efforts to end the climate emergency fail and temperatures rise by 4C, half of the world's population will suffer from this extreme heat stress.

The Met Office assessed wet-bulb temperature, which combines both heat and humidity. Once this measure reaches 35C, the human body cannot cool itself by sweating and even healthy people sitting in the shade will die within six hours, reports The Guardian.

Heat is the most obvious impact of global heating and extreme heat in cities across the world has tripled in recent decades, according to a recent study. In the summer of 2020, more than a quarter of the US population suffered from the effects of extreme heat, with symptoms including nausea and cramps.