Votum Klima

Objectives

Climate change: the greatest challenge currently facing humanity

Climate change affects the very existence of the whole of humanity, as well as people’s health and food security. It permanently destroys farmland, causes water sources to dry up and leads to the extinction of animals and plants. It alters ecosystems that have evolved over tens of thousands of years.

Climate change hits those countries particularly hard that have contributed the least to global warming: the developing countries. The main culprits – the western industrialised nations – must face up to their responsibility and help the developing countries.

Already, over 20 million people have been forced to flee because climate change has rendered their homelands uninhabitable. Over the next 30 years, we can expect to see many hundreds of millions of refugees.

Impact

Since the start of industrialisation, the Earth’s average temperature has risen by 0.85 degrees Celsius. Human activity is to blame for this. The massive burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil is turning the Earth into a greenhouse.

The forecast from leading climate experts is that if industrialised and emerging economies do not drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the average global temperature could rise by a further four degrees by the end of the century.

With the Paris Climate Agreement, signed by more than 170 countries in April 2016, the international community has committed itself to limiting the global temperature rise to a level of ‘well below two degrees Celsius’ and “to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius”.

Greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced to zero by the middle of this century. In practice, this means a complete phase-out of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas by the year 2050.