Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has told the United Nations the world isn't ready to face climate change.
Speaking at the One Planet Summit in New York on Thursday morning, Ms Ardern again called climate change "New Zealand's nuclear free moment" - and challenged leaders to deal with it.
"The Paris Agreement laid good foundations that we need but we know there is important work ahead," she told the crowd.
"But on climate change, time is not our friend."
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But there may have been one person she failed to convince - US President Donald Trump. Mr Trump has previously described climate change as a hoax and pulled the US out of the Agreement in 2017, arguing it's disadvantageous to the United States.
Speech notes from Ms Ardern's address to the UN Secretary-General's High Level Dialogue on Climate Change, also on Thursday morning, quote her calling for world leaders to "move off extreme positions".
"Political leaders may have thought that the Paris Agreement's adoption in 2016 meant 'job done'," the text of her speech says.
"But the Agreement only gives us the raw ingredients for climate action; the recipe - the detailed instructions - now have to be decided in Katowice."
The Katowice Climate Change Conference is aimed at ensuring the full implementation of the Paris Agreement, but Ms Ardern says the world isn't ready for it.
"There are now only a few months until Katowice and negotiators are frankly not ready. It is time for political leaders to send a crystal clear message that negotiation of the rulebook needs to be successfully concluded in December," the text of her UN speech reads.
"It is up to leaders - right now - to direct negotiators to move off extreme positions, to genuinely seek paths of convergence and to provide reassurance in the face of real anxieties."
Appearing on The AM Show on Thursday, Newshub political editor Tova O'Brien told host Duncan Garner that Ms Ardern's comments are a "dig" at Mr Trump.
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"If I was Trump, I would return fire and say 'hang on Jacinda, what about your transport industry... you can hardly talk love'," Garner responded.
"He should say something like that, because quite frankly New Zealanders are running around polluting the world and we're not being punished for it."
O'Brien said Mr Trump was unlikely to be listening to Ms Ardern.
"Maybe the US President could raise some of those gripes around New Zealand's climate action, but I don't really think he's hearing any of the other countries at the UN are saying at the moment," she says.
"He's very much putting America first -as he says, 'making America great again'."
Ms Ardern also met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the UN, where she brought up trade issues.
"In New Zealand, we've had the experience that globalisation, the opening up of trade and the reduction of barriers hasn't benefited everyone equally," she said.
"So we launched a trade for all agenda; we're asking New Zealanders what they want to see from future free trade agreements. We want to model what prosperous trade that benefits and creates a more inclusive society and lifts everyone up more generally would [look] like."
Newshub.
