Running out of time
Since our last edition was published, it has been a challenging and turbulent time for both me personally, and for Chile. In August, I had serious health issues which caused us to close the magazine temporarily for a few months. In October, Chile turned upside down. The once stable Chile was inundated with violent protests over long running economic inequality issues. Across the country, literally millions of Chileans vociferously showed that they no longer could put up with constant price hikes, political abuses, deficient social programs and most of all, the stark gap between rich and poor.
Social unrest in Chile was such that it caused the nation to cancel plans for hosting in December the COP25, the United Nations annual climate change summit – and that meeting is about the biggest crisis of all. The scenes wrought by Australia’s recent firestorms are what environmental hell looks like; scientists say more than a billion species may have perished. And those bushfires in Australia are most definitely traced to record heatwaves (temperatures have soared to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 50 degrees Celsius) and unprecedented drought in an already dry region. That’s a dangerous cocktail served up by climate change that will be coming to a region near you too if society doesn’t get off its addiction to oil, gas and coal.
What’s the link between climate change and Chile’s social crisis? For one, the poorest suffer the most in a warming world. Six of Chile’s regions – from Atacama in the north to Maule in the south – have experienced a “megadrought” since 2010 that has caused farmers to abandon crops and mass deaths of livestock. The UN warns that if we don’t halve carbon emissions by 2030 the world’s average temperature will rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and thus intensifying, among other negative impacts, extreme weather events in the form of drought, floods, fires and hurricanes.
Time is running out. The previous decade was the warmest in human history. This new decade must see us turn around toward a better future.