António Guterres warns rising seas could cause countries and cultures to "vanish beneath the waves"

The U.N. General Assembly on Thursday approved an initial declaration about rising seas, and Secretary-General António Guterres cautioned that some nations and their cultural heritage are at risk of being lost as oceans rise. The measure is meant to move the international response away from piecemeal initiatives toward continuous, coordinated and sufficiently financed efforts. It followed a week of speeches in which numerous countries described climate-related damage and pressed for joint action. Separately, U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed climate change as false or fraudulent.