Waiting for a Catastrophic Wake-Up Call
Disasters are the new midwives of history. But in order to play this role, they need to be catastrophic, like the accidents in Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 that led governments to suspend and even abolish their nuclear energy programs. To spur real action on climate change, a disaster would have to be serious enough to change people’s minds, but not so great as to be uncontrollable, according to Martin Lees, Rector Emeritus of the United Nations University for Peace, “Urgent and deep cuts” in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to curb global warming and its impacts, stresses the statement “Action to Face the Urgent Realities of Climate Change”, presented at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) by the Climate Change Task Force (CCTF).
