The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged world leaders to take action on climate change as he declared 2023 the hottest year ever recorded.

Speaking at the opening of the COP28 conference in Dubai on Thursday, Guterres said the state of the global climate was "stark and clear".

"Things are moving so fast that a full month before the end of the year, we can already declare that 2023 is the hottest year recorded in human history," he said in a video message.

He added that this year had seen communities around the world "pounded by fires, floods, and searing temperatures".

The COP28 conference marks the end of the Global Stocktake, the first comprehensive assessment of the world's progress toward the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The conference aims to finalize the rules for implementing the agreement and to raise the ambition of the countries' pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Guterres said the Global Stocktake had shown that the world was "far off track" from meeting the Paris targets of limiting global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

He called on the leaders to "show the political will and the courage" to make the necessary decisions to "close the emissions gap and the finance gap" and to "adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change".

He warned that the world was facing a "climate emergency" and that "the time to act is now". (ILKHA)