A new assessment found runaway carbon emissions and melting ice sheets could result in such a worst case scenario, potentially double the upper limit outlined by the UN climate science panel’s last major report.

Around 1.79 million square kilometres of land could be lost and up to 187 million people displaced. “Many small island states, particularly those in the Pacific, will effectively be pretty much inhabitable. We are talking about an existential threat to nation states,” says Bamber.

French Guiana, a small French overseas territory on the north-eastern coast of South America, is one of the most forested nations on the planet, but its precious ecosystem is under threat from illegal gold mining.

Since then, the price of gold has continued to soar and rampant illegal gold mining has destroyed swathes of jungle from Ecuador across Peru, Colombia and Venezuela to Brazil.

It was signed by France, Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden.

But not everyone is on board - there are 28 countries in the EU, and several of those absent from the joint position statement are significant players - including Germany.

The position of the eight countries is that climate change has "profound implications for the future of humanity" and that its impacts are already apparent - citing "the heat waves and scorching fires of last summer".

But several countries oppose strengthening current commitments, which have proven difficult to stick to just two years after the Paris climate agreement was signed.

Political and economic giant Germany is among them, fearing that further action could damage its industry.

Around 12 million hectares of forest in the world's tropical regions were lost in 2018, equivalent to 30 football fields per minute.

Millions of hectares of these forests have been lost in recent decades, having been cleared by commercial or agricultural interests.

If preventive steps are not taken, in less than three decades, Britain might run out of water, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, a public body responsible for conservation in England, said on Tuesday.

The reasons, he said, were climate change and population growth. And he called for a change of attitude toward water conservation to help tackle the problem.

Now, reports Marlene Cimons at Nexus Media, that pollution is getting even worse. A new study in the journal Current Biology shows that plastic trash on the beaches and in the ocean has increased tenfold in the just the last decade and a hundredfold over the last three decades.

“Three decades ago these islands, which are some of the most remote on the planet, were near-pristine,” lead author David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey says in a statement. “Plastic waste has increased a hundredfold in that time, it is now so common it reaches the seabed. We found it in plankton, throughout the food chain and up to top predators such as seabirds.”

Pushing their way into the heart of a forest that has existed for 12,000 years, where some 60 treehouses have been built over the past six years, thousands of police officers began cutting trees to reach a central community called “Oaktown.”

In recent weeks, environmentalists have drawn attention to the mine, which is operated by the energy company RWE in the Hambach Forest, east of the city of Aachen, in an effort to highlight the disparity between Germany’s pledges to reduce its carbon emissions and uphold its commitments to the Paris climate accord and the country’s heavy use of its only significant natural resource, soft coal, or lignite.

Mr Guterres painted a grim picture of the impacts of climate change that he says have been felt all over the world this year, with heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods leaving a trail of destruction.

Despite the fact that the world agreed on a plan to tackle climate change in Paris in 2015, Mr Guterres said the world is way off track to achieve the modest goals of the pact.

Mr Guterres says he is committing himself and the UN to the effort of transforming the political landscape to tame the threat of climate change. He pointed to the forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on how to keep the world from warming by more that 1.5 degrees C, which he says will be a sobering assessment.

Since October 2015, customers have had to pay at least 5p for each single-use bag - with all retailers employing more than 250 people made to take part in the scheme.

Many of the seven major supermarkets have already stopped selling single-use carrier bags in their stores. Sainsbury's 5p bags are thicker and stronger, so they are not considered to be single use, while Tesco only sells 10p bags for life.

The National Audit Office (NAO) says over half of the packaging reported as recycled is actually being sent abroad to be processed.

The NAO's report found only 25% of the firms most likely to misbehave over re-processing or exporting waste are inspected, while just 40% of planned compliance visits were actually carried out.