LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Climate action increasingly urgent

The unprecedented severity of the bushfires in Australia is a warning to governments around the world that we must combat climate change with greater urgency. The bushfires have unleashed catastrophic conditions which have killed at least 28 people, destroyed well over 2,000 homes, forced large scale evacuations and killed hundreds of millions of animals.

Bushfires are a fact of life in Australia. However, climate change has played a major role in the drought and high temperatures that have fuelled the current fires. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has declared 2019 the hottest year on record in Australia and the driest year on record. Many communities have been experiencing temperatures over 45 degrees Celsius.

In Western Canada we have witnessed the growing risk forest fires pose, with the evacuation of 13,000 residents of northern Saskatchewan in 2015, the horrendous Fort Mcmurray fire in 2016 and a record-high 1,354,000 hectares lost to fire in British Columbia in 2018. Now the unprecedented scale of Australia’s bushfires provides another frightening glimpse into the risks posed by climate change.

The urgent task facing humanity is to prevent the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from continuing to rise each year. This can only be accomplished by phasing out fossil fuel consumption as rapidly as possible. Every country in the world needs to be part of this effort to save our planet from ecological disaster. With its exceptionally high carbon footprint, Saskatchewan bears special responsibility to start co-operating with Ottawa on real climate action. Peter Prebble, Saskatoon