Climate change is becoming the 21st century’s “nuclear war”, in the sense of being an existential problem which poses an imminent global risk, a collection of senior world leaders have warned. In particular, the challenge posed by environmental issues is now so large – and rising – that it demands urgent collective action to avoid a devastating outcome, they have added. “Some years ago, the only concern was a nuclear war. It’s still a great concern – and we’re going backward – but it’s only a probability,” Juan Manuel Santos, former president of Colombia and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize winner, told Moral Money. “Climate change is a certainty and it’s as devastating as nuclear war.”
The unusually strongly worded comments come amid a growing chorus of alarm about the environment. Extinction Rebellion protests have sparked a storm of media comment in recent months. Yet Mr Santos and others fear that progress towards combating climate change remains too slow. After leaving office in 2018, Mr Santos joined “the Elders”, a global group of former high-ranking officials, which has determined that one of its primary concerns is ensuring that the world stays on track to hit the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by the 2030 target date.
The group admits that progress is uneven. “We are not happy,” said Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and chair of the Elders, when asked how she felt about the world’s progress on the SDGs. “The implementation is spotty. It’s not nearly coherent enough … there’s still a lot of work to be done particularly at the national level.”
Achieving the SDGs was never going to be easy in the first place, she said. Now things are looking even tougher. New studies show that global warming needs to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than the 2 degree target outlined in Paris, to avoid the worst effects of climate change, yet global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, Ms Robinson said.
“Even though the SDGs were negotiated to be voluntary and the climate agreement was not very binding, now science has made them imperative and yet we are not