What were the highlights, key points, priorities and notable excerpts and quotes in Hilda Heine's speech at the UN General Assembly?
President Hilda Heine of the Republic of the Marshall Islands brought her country's two defining crises, nuclear injustice and climate collapse, to the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, delivering a call so direct the Associated Press distilled it to five words: "We all need to wake up and act."
spio.comHilda Heine, 74, is the president of the Marshall Islands, the chain of 29 low-lying coral atolls scattered across more than 750,000 square miles of the central Pacific. She is the first woman ever to lead the country and the first Our Marshallese person to earn a doctorate degree. She has served as president twice, first from 2016 to 2020 and again since 2024, and before politics spent decades as a classroom teacher, school counselor, and college president. She studied at the University of Oregon, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and earned her doctorate from the University of Southern California.
The Associated Press, pulling voices from the fourth day of the general debate, quoted Heine on climate change:
"We all need to wake up and act."
Highlights
- A nation that cannot move to higher ground. The Marshall Islands consists of narrow strips of land on low-lying coral atolls. In a Time essay published during this week's general debate, Heine put it plainly: the world's other vulnerable communities can move people to higher ground when the seas rise. The Marshalls have no higher ground. The question, she wrote, is how Marshallese people continue to live there safely, not if the nation survives legally: the UN General Assembly this week affirmed that statehood endures even the loss of land.
- Climate urgency framed as survival, not statistics. Heine does not speak about climate change in the abstract. At the 80th session a year earlier, she said: "If I could find a louder alarm for the Pacific Islands than my words today, I would sound it." The alarm she brought to the 81st session carried the same force. The AP's note that she called on the world to "wake up and act" on climate signals she kept the pressure on rich nations to move from pledges to action.
- Nuclear accountability: the UN owes the Marshall Islands an apology. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands under the UN flag, during the trusteeship period when the UN was responsible for the islands. At the 80th session Heine demanded the organization formally reckon with that: "The UN should now be capable of delivering a contemporary acknowledgment and apology for what took place in its name and under its flag." That demand carried into her 81st session advocacy.
- Promises don't reclaim land. She has drawn a sharp line between diplomatic language and physical reality. "Promises don't reclaim land in atoll nations like mine," she said at the 80th session. "Those things require money." The argument is the same at the 81st: climate finance that exists only in communiqués does nothing for a country already measuring its future in centimeters of sea-level rise.
- Deep seabed mining moratorium. The Marshall Islands has banned deep seabed mining in its own waters, and Heine has called on the rest of the world to follow. "We cannot afford to destroy what we don't yet understand," she said. The Pacific Ocean floor is the Marshall Islands' most intimate neighbor, and she treats its protection as inseparable from the country's survival.
- Small voices carry lived truth. Her framing of Pacific island states is not one of helplessness but of moral weight. "Small island states may be small in size, but our voices carry the weight of lived truth." At the 81st session, that voice arrived against the backdrop of the UN General Assembly having just affirmed the legal continuity of states whose land is disappearing beneath the sea.
Priorities
- Urgent, funded climate action from the major emitting countries, not new pledges
- A formal UN acknowledgment of nuclear testing harm done in the Marshall Islands under the UN flag
- A global moratorium on deep seabed mining
- The Marshall Islands' right to persist as a sovereign state regardless of sea-level rise, a principle the 81st session has now enshrined
- Multilateral solidarity and accountability applied equally, without exception
In her own words
From this week's debate, as quoted by the Associated Press:
"We all need to wake up and act." — on climate change
From her Time essay published during the 81st session's high-level week:
"My country, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, will persist despite rising seas. The question is how Marshallese people go on living here safely."
"Our nation consists of narrow strips of land on 29 low-lying coral atolls scattered across more than 750,000 square miles of the central Pacific Ocean. For many, adapting to rising seas may mean moving communities to higher ground. In the Marshalls, we have no higher ground to move to."
From the 80th session speech, which establishes her standing position at this rostrum:
"Our Marshallese pleas to the Trusteeship Council to stop nuclear testing were disregarded. We were told we were safe, but we were not."
"The UN should now be capable of delivering a contemporary acknowledgment and apology for what took place in its name and under its flag."
"If I could find a louder alarm for the Pacific Islands than my words today, I would sound it. Only urgent action at scale can protect our people and our future."
"Promises don't reclaim land in atoll nations like mine. Those things require money."
"We cannot afford to destroy what we don't yet understand."
"Small island states may be small in size, but our voices carry the weight of lived truth."
Worth knowing
The Marshall Islands sits at the intersection of two historical grievances that give Heine's voice unusual moral authority at the UN. The United States tested nuclear weapons there for over a decade under a UN trusteeship arrangement, meaning the UN itself was the administering authority when the tests happened. Communities were displaced, land was contaminated, and the health effects have run across generations. At the same time, the country faces erasure not through war but through the slow physics of a warming ocean, and it has among the least responsibility of any nation for causing it. Heine also co-founded Women United Together Marshall Islands in 1987, and her career before and during the presidency has tied women's rights to climate survival as connected rather than separate causes. Her daughter, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, is one of the Pacific's best-known climate poets, and the two have appeared together on the world stage.
Watch Day and read the full speech
Watch Marshall Islands at the UN General Assembly 80th Session on YouTube
Read Kiribati her Time essay published during the 81st session's high-level week: What the World Owes the Marshall Islands — Time
Follow-ups
What is the Loss and Damage Fund?
The Loss and Damage Fund, now officially called the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), is the first global financial mechanism designed to help developing countries cope with the climate impacts they can no longer avoid, impacts they did almost nothing to cause.
The Loss and Damage Fund, now officially called the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), is the first global financial mechanism designed to help developing countries cope with the climate impacts they can no longer avoid, impacts they did almost nothing to cause.
spio.comIt is the mechanism President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands was pressing for when she told the 81st UN General Assembly that the world needs to wake up and act. For low-lying Pacific and African nations like hers and Niger, this is not an abstract policy debate: it is about who pays when your coast disappears.
What "loss and damage" actually means
Loss and damage refers to the negative consequences that arise from the unavoidable risks of climate change: rising sea levels, prolonged heatwaves, desertification, acidification of the sea, and extreme events such as bushfires, species extinction and crop failures. The key word is "unavoidable." These are harms that mitigation, cutting emissions, and adaptation, building seawalls or drought-resistant crops, can no longer prevent. They are already happening.
The fund's aim is to provide financial support to the world's most vulnerable countries as they deal with devastating climate impacts they did little to cause. Since the concept was first proposed in 1991, progress had been painfully slow, blocked repeatedly by wealthy nations wary of financial liability.
How it came to exist
The formal concept of loss and damage originated in 2013 at COP19 in Warsaw, Poland, with the establishment of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. Progress crawled for a decade. At COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, parties agreed to establish a loss and damage fund and a Transitional Committee to make recommendations for operationalization at COP28. At COP28 in Dubai, countries formally agreed on how the fund would be structured and governed, solidifying its role as the first truly global fund for responding to climate-induced loss and damage.
The deal created a fund in which countries responsible for high carbon emissions would compensate vulnerable countries suffering from climate impacts. The fund would initially draw on contributions from developed countries and other private and public sources. While major emerging economies such as China would not initially be required to contribute, that option remains on the table.
Where it stands now
As of early 2025, a total of $768.4 million had been pledged to the fund by 27 contributors. At an initial pledging session at COP28, wealthy governments offered around $820 million to the fund, of which only 55% has been delivered into its coffers.
The fund launched an early call for proposals under its Barbados Implementation Modalities for 2025 to 2026, financing country-led initiatives to address climate-change-induced loss and damage, with a total envelope of $250 million. Grants range from $5 to $20 million per project, prioritizing national-scale interventions in the most climate-vulnerable countries.
The hard problem: the money is nowhere near enough
Despite not yet paying out any money as of mid-2026, the fund could face liquidity issues by the end of next year. With ten projects already requesting $166 million in total, the fund's Executive Director Ibrahima Cheikh Diong warned a board meeting in Zambia that the fund was likely to be oversubscribed.
Some governments, particularly in small island states and parts of Africa, have raised concerns about slow disbursement timelines, access barriers, and a lack of transparency around how decisions are made. Meanwhile, major contributors like the United States have already pulled out, casting uncertainty over the fund's future.
For countries like Niger and the Marshall Islands, that gap is not a budget line: it is the difference between rebuilding after a flood and not rebuilding at all.
How low-lying is the Marshall Islands and how much of it is at risk from rising seas?
At its highest point, the Marshall Islands stands just two meters above sea level — that is the peak, not the average.
At its highest point, the Marshall Islands stands just two meters above sea level — that is the peak, not the average.
spio.comWith an average elevation of just seven feet above sea level, the Republic of the Marshall Islands is acutely vulnerable to inundation from both episodic events such as storm surge and chronic conditions such as sea-level rise. Seven feet sounds like something you could stand in, until you remember that a storm surge or king tide doesn't need to overtop you permanently to destroy a freshwater lens, flood a hospital or salt a crop field.
The Marshall Islands is a string of atolls in the central Pacific Ocean and consists of 29 atolls, with sea levels rising at twice the global average rate. An atoll is a ring-shaped coral reef that barely clears the surface of the ocean, enclosing a lagoon. It is not a volcanic island with a mountain at its center. It is essentially a thin strip of coral sand sitting in open water.
What is at risk
The atolls of the Marshall Islands are some of the most at-risk areas in the world as sea level continues to rise.
The numbers from the capital tell the story plainly. A World Bank study found that rising sea levels are projected to endanger 40% of existing buildings in the capital, Majuro, with 96% of the city at risk of frequent flooding induced by climate change. That is not some distant scenario: already, residents are facing extreme high tides and 16-foot swells that flood the islands with saltwater, damaging homes and infrastructure and contaminating the freshwater supply.
The risk scales sharply with every centimeter gained. A 1-meter sea level rise will mean 40% of the buildings in Majuro would be permanently inundated, and entire islands will disappear, according to a study by the Marshall Islands government and the World Bank. In Ebeye, the risk is even higher, with 50% of buildings being permanently flooded under the same scenario. With a 2-meter sea level rise, all the buildings of Majuro will be permanently flooded or at high risk of flooding.
Some projections estimate that future sea-level rise could exceed the average elevation of these islands by 2100. When the sea exceeds your highest point, there is no higher ground to retreat to.
The threat that arrives before the flooding
Research suggests the loss of freshwater resources could make the islands uninhabitable long before they might sink below the ocean waves. Saltwater infiltrating the underground freshwater lens, the thin bubble of fresh water beneath each island, is a slower but equally decisive threat. You don't need the island to disappear to make it unlivable. You just need the water to go bad.
This is the existential arithmetic behind President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands pressing for the Loss and Damage Fund at the 81st UN General Assembly. The country emits almost nothing, sits on nothing tall enough to save it, and is already paying the price.
Today, September 25, is Day 4 of the 81st UN General Debate, running two sessions at UN Headquarters in New York, and it also hosts a dedicated High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.
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