- Title: Thunberg: "Are we ready to take action" in climate fight?
- Date: 9th August 2021
- Summary: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (AUGUST 9, 2021) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) SWEDISH CLIMATE ACTIVIST, GRETA THUNBERG, SAYING: "This report doesn't tell us what to do. It doesn't say you have to do this and then you have to do this. It doesn't provide us with such solutions or tell us that you need to do this. And that's up for us. We are the ones who need to take the decisions and we are the ones who need to be brave and ask the difficult questions to ourselves, like what do we value? Are we ready to take action to ensure future and present living conditions? So I hope that this can be a wake up call and that it really gives perspective and that it once again can be a reminder that the climate crisis has not going away. It's only escalating and it's only growing more intense by the hour."
- Embargoed: 23rd August 2021 12:35
- Keywords: 1.5 degrees Greta Thunberg IPCC IPCC report United Nations climate change climate crisis global warming greenhouse gas
- Location: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN / LIMNI, EVIA, GREECE / VARIOUS FILE LOCATIONS
- City: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN / LIMNI, EVIA, GREECE / VARIOUS FILE LOCATIONS
- Country: Various
- Topics: Climate Change,Environment,General News,Government / Politics,Climate Politics
- Reuters ID: LVA007EPK6VD3
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Calling for action to fight climate change after Monday's (August 9) dire report by a U.N. science panel, activist Greta Thunberg said she plans to go to this year's global climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, after all.
The major U.N. conference will test countries' ambition to limit global warming, which a landmark scientific report on Monday warned was dangerously close to escalating beyond the limits countries agreed on.
"I hope that this can be a wake up call," Thunberg said of the report, in an interview with Reuters.
"We are the ones who need to be brave and ask the difficult questions to ourselves, like what do we value? Are we ready to take action to ensure future and present living conditions?"
Referring to a recent spate of extreme weather events, Thunberg said: "These are all just symptoms of the climate crisis. We're not talking about the root cause itself, the things that are actually fuelling these events. And we are not holding people in power accountable."
The U.N. report landed just three months before the Glasgow conference in November.
Thunberg, who has rallied youth to protest for climate action worldwide, had initially said she would skip the event out of concern that the uneven rollout of COVID-19 vaccines across the world would leave some countries unable to attend safely.
But Britain's offer in June to vaccinate delegates assuages some of that concern, the 18-year-old Swedish campaigner said.
"I've said before that I wasn't going to go if it wasn't fair," Thunberg said. "But now they say that they will vaccinate all the delegates that are going there. If that's considered fair and safe, then I will hopefully attend."
With wildfires ripping through Greece and Turkey this week, just weeks after deadly flooding swept through China and Germany and heatwaves baked the United States, Thunberg said people's awareness of climate change was increasing, but "very slowly".
But she said world leaders had ignored scientists' previous warnings about climate change and she did not expect them to match words with action in response to the latest U.N. report.
"I expect them to go out and have big speeches, or press releases, or posts on social media where they say the climate crisis is very important and we are doing everything that we can," Thunberg said.
"What they consider to be climate action today is almost only creative carbon accounting or setting vague, distant targets without taking action now."
(Production: Matt Stock/Kate Abnett) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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