Climate change threatens to lead to a “truly terrifying future of famine and suffering,” UN human rights High Commissioner Volker Dürk warned on Monday.
He accused world leaders of being content with words and thinking only in the short term to combat the climate crisis, during a UN Human Rights Council debate on the right to food. “Our environment is burning. He melts. It is flooded. He is exhausted. It will dry out. He dies,” he said, fearing a “dystopian future.”
The right to food is under threat from climate change, he said, as extreme weather events destroy crops, livestock and ecosystems. These recurring events make it impossible for human societies to rebuild to allow them to support themselves, he said.
“A Human Rights Issue”
“More than 828 million people face hunger in 2021,” he noted. “And climate change is expected to put another 80 million people at risk of starvation by the middle of this year. A truly terrifying scale”. According to him, “dealing with climate change is a human rights issue” and “there is still time to act. It is now”.
“We cannot pass this future of hunger and suffering on to our children and their children. We don’t have to,” he insisted. “We, the generation with the most powerful technological tools in history, have the ability to change it.” They engage in a dance that gets stuck in time,” he said.
He called for an end to “pointless subsidies” to the fossil fuel industry, hoping the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in November and December should be a “game changer”. Maddened by greenwashing and greenwashing practices and their greed, he asked the world to “run” climate science skeptics.
1.69°C
The Paris Agreement, concluded at the end of COP21 in December 2015, is precisely aimed at keeping the increase in global average temperature “well below 2°C” this century and continuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
However, the world’s average daily temperature reached at least 1.5°C between June 7 and 11 above pre-industrial levels, and reached 1.69°C on June 9, a spokesperson for the European Copernicus Service on climate change told AFP in mid-June.
Read more
June has never been so hot: “We’re constantly going from one extreme to another”
Climate: Wallonia won’t do more “because Flanders doesn’t want to do its part”
European Nature Restoration Act: European Parliament rejects text, vote postponed to July
Free onbeperkt toegang tot Showbytes? That’s Gun!
Log in to the Maak een account.
“Total coffee junkie. Tv ninja. Unapologetic problem solver. Beer expert.”