What were the highlights, key points, priorities and notable excerpts and quotes in Hilda Heine's speech at the UN General Assembly?

Hilda 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