It’s our turn to make sacrifices today

PREDICTABLY, the nations most responsible for the increasingly dire straits in which the world finds itself as a result of unprecedented, accelerated climate change – caused for the most part by their unrestricted use of fossil fuels – have reacted negatively to the suggestion that they should provide significant financial aid to poorer nations who will pay a high price for trying to reverse, or at least, limit the effects of an apocalyptic crisis that is not of their making.

At school in the 1940s and 50s, we were taught that we could be proud of the fact that our country was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution – a bandwagon (with hindsight a doomsday train) that other countries eagerly jumped on.

It’s time for us to recognise that the short-term benefits resulting from that revolution have been far outweighed by the damage it has caused to our environment.

It is only right that Britain and other countries that have grown fat from plundering and, in the case of fossil fuels, wantonly misusing, our planet’s resources, causing what may well be irreversible damage to its future, should bear the lion’s share

of the bill, whatever it may be, for implementing the steps necessary to save the world.

It will cause massive hardship – but it’s a price we must be prepared to pay.

To paraphrase (with apologies) from the Kohima Epitaph, for our children’s tomorrow and that of generations to come, we must be prepared to sacrifice today.

Robert Readman

Dorset