United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk warned that climate changes threatens to deliver a “truly terrifying” dystopian future of hunger and suffering, and slammed world leaders for only thinking of the short term while dealing with the climate crisis.
Turk told a UN Human Rights Council debate on the right to food that extreme weather events were wiping out crops, herds, and ecosystems, making it impossible for communities to rebuild and support themselves.
“More than 828 million people faced hunger in 2021. And climate change is projected to place up to 80 million more people at risk of hunger by the middle of this century,” he said.
“Our environment is burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying,” Turk said, evoking a dystopian future.
“Addressing climate change is a human rights issue… there is still time to act. But that time is now,” he added.
Turk said world leaders “perform the choreography of deciding to act and promising to act and then get stuck in the short term,” and called for an end to “senseless subsidies” of the fossil fuel industry, and said the Dubai COP28 climate summit in November and December needed to be the “decisive game-changer that we so badly need.”
A truly terrifying dystopian future filled with hunger and suffering is what is in store for future generations if the current one fails in its duty to do better, especially when it comes to mitigating the effects of global warming and climate change. The results of the global effort have been underwhelming so far, which means that the future is still looking like it will be overwhelmingly disastrous for the members of the human race who will have to pay for our current lack of will and action.
We have been reminded, time and again by scientists and data, on what will happen to the planet and its inhabitants if we do not act with urgency. How many more warnings are we going to conveniently ignore because everything still seems “all right”?*
