‘Cost of climate crisis unimaginable’

Mediterranean nations must lead the way in addressing climate change, the Greek prime minister said, warning that the cost of doing nothing was unimaginable, with mankind possibly struggling to survive beyond the turn of the next century.

Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Spain were ravaged by wildfires and record high temperatures this summer, with scientists warning the region had turned into a wildfire hotspot.

Germany, Turkey and China were pounded with devastating floods.

“I no longer want to talk about climate change. I want to talk about the climate crisis.

“It’s already here,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said.

“And to address it we need horizontal policies which essentially permeate every aspect of our economic and social lives.”

A UN climate panel has warned that deadly heatwaves, huge hurricanes and other freak weather events will only become more severe.

Harvard-educated Mitsotakis, 53, has made climate action a focal point of his administration.

Soon after his election in July 2019, he announced a ban on coal-fired power stations from 2028, and created a civil protection ministry tasked with dealing with crises.

Mitsotakis hosted leaders of nine southern European nations, in the front line of climate change, in Athens on Friday, when they called for urgent global action as part of an “Athens declaration” initiated by Mitsotakis.

The UN COP26 climate conference in Glasgow starting on October 31 aims to wring much more ambitious climate action and the money to go with it from countries around the globe.

In a potential worst-case scenario, the climate crisis would represent the “destruction of human civilisation as we know it”, Mitsotakis said.

“If the worst-case scenarios materialise, this planet is not going to be hospitable to the human species by the end of this century.

The World Meteorological Organisation, a UN agency, has assessed that the numbers of disasters driven by climate change have increased five-fold over the past 50 years, killing more than two-million people and costing $3.64-trillion (R53.7-trillion) in total losses.

The cost of the crisis was “unimaginable” on a global scale and even in terms of economies, Mitsotakis said.

Floods in Greece cost half a billion euros last year, and every crop ravaged by weather extremes could run into hundreds of millions in damages.