António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, compared the climate emergency, exacerbated in recent weeks with heat waves and forest fires, to a “collective suicide”. He was speaking to authorities from 40 countries gathered in Berlin on Monday (18).
“Half of humanity lives in danger zones of floods, droughts, extreme storms and forest fires”, said the Portuguese, according to a report by the British newspaper The Guardian. “But we continue to feed our addiction to fossil fuels; we have a choice: collective action or collective suicide.”
Government representatives are meeting at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, a conference organized by the German government. The objective is to strengthen the negotiations and pressure the authorities for more ambitious goals for the COP27 (UN climate conference), scheduled to take place in November, in Egypt.
The negotiations come up against the retreat of several climate goals caused, among other factors, by the War in Ukraine. The government of Prime Minister Olaf Scholz, host of the event, for example, announced in June that it would restart coal plants to save natural gas and thus lessen dependence on gas coming from Russia.
The message of the meeting, however, is one of progress. “The climate crisis is the most serious security issue of our time,” wrote German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Twitter. “Too much damage has already been done; now it’s time to act.”
Governments meet in Berlin at the same time as several countries watch the consequences of climate change. In England, for the first time the National Weather Service predicted that temperatures could reach 41°C this Monday or Tuesday (19). The government then issued a national emergency alert.
The temperature would represent a historic record for the United Kingdom, since the highest figure ever recorded was 38.7°C, in the city of Cambridge, exactly three years ago. London has triggered alert level 4, which indicates that the heat wave could have impacts beyond health, with consequences for transport systems, for example.
Penny Endersby, director of the British weather service, told the BBC that several studies have shown that, without climate change, there would be no chance of the UK seeing temperatures in the 40°C range.
But he added that by the end of this century, those temperatures could be expected once every 15 or three years — “it will depend on the emissions decisions we make from now on.”
Spain, meanwhile, is facing the eighth day of a heat wave that has led to more than 510 deaths, according to the Carlos 3º Health Institute. More than 70,000 hectares burned amid forest fires, the highest figure in the last decade according to official data.
Almost the entire country faces extreme fire risk. On Sunday night (17), a firefighter died in the province of Zamora, in the northwest of the country. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez mourned the death and thanked all rescuers. “Climate change kills, we’re seeing it,” he told a news conference after hitting hard-hit areas. “We will make environmental policies a matter of state.”
France also expects to register on Monday one of the hottest days in the country’s history, with temperatures reaching 40°C in some coastal regions where the main economic activity is tourism. This would be the 45th heat wave recorded in the country since 1947, according to information from the newspaper Le Monde.
