World leaders at climate summit need to act rather than just talk, says Thunberg
JOHANNESBURG: The world’s children cannot afford more empty promises at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), youth activists including Greta Thunberg said, after a UN report found that virtually no child will escape the impact of global warming.
In the first index of its kind, published on Friday, UN children’s agency Unicef found that almost all the world’s 2.2 billion children are exposed to at least one climate or environmental risk, from catastrophic floods to toxic air.
Last week, a UN climate panel of the world’s top atmospheric scientists warned that global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, with deadly heat waves, hurricanes and other extreme events likely to keep getting worse.
Thunberg, 18, said the Unicef index confirmed children would be the worst affected, and when world leaders meet in Glasgow in November for COP26 they needed to act rather than just talk.
“I don’t expect them to do that, but I would be more than happy if they could prove me wrong,” she told journalists ahead of the index’s publication on the third anniversary of Fridays For Future, a now-global youth movement that started with her solo protest outside her Swedish school.
356,000 people died as a result of extreme heat
More than 356,000 people died in 2019 as a result of extreme heat and that number is likely to grow, according to a study published in The Lancet this week.
The Global Burden of Disease review, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found while cold temperatures still cause a greater number of deaths, mortality rates attributable to heat are growing faster, particularly in hotter regions of the world.
“This is very concerning, particularly given the risk of exposure to high temperatures appears to have been increasing steadily for decades,” said co-author Katrin Burkart from the University of Washington.
The findings echo another report, a two-part series called Heat and Health that was also published in The Lancet this week.
It calls for global warming to be limited to 1.5°C, in line with the Paris Climate Accords, to reduce heat-related mortality in the future.
“The effects extreme heat exposure can have on the body present a clear and growing global health issue,” said Ollie Jay, a professor from the University of Sydney, and a co-author of the Heat and Health report.