The United Nations executive secretary for Climate Change, Simon Stiell, warned today of the need for humanity to abandon fossil fuels more rapidly and to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy.
“What we must do is clear: to abandon coal, oil, and gas more quickly,” said the official, in remarks about the major fires in Europe, particularly in France and Spain.
Simon Stiell stated that the “climate alarm is sounding loudly everywhere” and that around the world disasters caused by climate change are reaching alarming proportions, “while the costs of humanity’s reliance on burning coal, oil and gas continue to soar.”
The unprecedented wildfires that are ravaging France, Spain and other parts of Europe, forcing mass evacuations and severely impacting regional and national economies, “are the result of brutal heatwaves that left landscapes parched.”
As temperatures rise, the devastating costs of this climate crisis, both human and economic, are now reaching “national emergency levels,” he said.
Beyond the fires in Europe, Simon Stiell recalled temperatures approaching 49°C in North Africa, placing lives and livelihoods at serious risk, deadly storms in Chile, and Japan, which is breaking records, with the largest heatwave above 40°C ever recorded.
These increasingly intense disasters are now a daily reality for billions of people in a world that is warming rapidly, while humanity is moving far too slowly in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and in protecting forests, he warned.
Science is unequivocal: global warming is making prolonged heatwaves, severe floods and mega-storms more frequent, more intense and more costly, he warned.
French authorities ordered today the preventive evacuation of about 4,000 people from the Atlantic coast, in the Gironde region, due to the return of high temperatures, which threaten to compromise the control of a vast forest fire.
The fire, considered stabilized but not yet extinguished, has already forced about 220,000 people to abandon their homes since last week.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, the fires have already consumed more than 116,000 hectares in France since the start of the year.
In Spain, hundreds of firefighters continue to combat several large wildfires, at a time when the country is preparing for the fourth heatwave of the summer, with temperatures above 40°C in some regions.
