Attenborough warns of climate 'crisis moment'

LONDON • The moment of crisis has come in the efforts to tackle climate change, warned ren-owned climate campaigner David Attenborough, who described international negotiations as "grindingly slow".

"We have to realise that this is not playing games," the British naturalist and broadcaster told the BBC in an interview pub-lished yesterday.

"This is not just having a nice little debate, arguments, and then coming away with a compromise.

"This is an urgent problem that has to be solved and, what is more, we know how to do it - that is the paradoxical thing, that we are refusing to take steps that we know have to be taken."

Mr Attenborough said that while climate scientists are becoming clearer about the need for a rapid response, the pace of international negotiations is grindingly slow.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid last year that involved nearly 200 countries failed to make decisions on key issues, leaving them for the next major talks in Glasgow towards the end of this year.

Delegates and civil society groups said that big polluting countries, including the United States, Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, presented the main obstacles to stronger ambition.

The UN's top climate science panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in a landmark report in 2018 that to limit warming to 1.5 deg C, global CO2 emissions need to fall by 45 per cent by 2030 based on 2010 levels, and reach "net-zero" by 2050.

"Every year that passes makes those steps more and more difficult to achieve," Mr Attenborough told the BBC.

While most political attention will be on climate change, 2020 is also seen as potentially vital for halting the damage human activity is having on ecosystems. "We actually depend upon the natural world for every breath of air we take and every mouthful of food that we eat," said Mr Attenborough.