Climate change campaigners rallied outside Britain’s Houses of Parliament ahead of Earth Day to urge action on global warming, as volunteers around the world set out to plant trees and clean up litter for the 54th annual celebration of the environment.
This year’s Earth Day, officially on Saturday, follows weeks of extreme weather with temperatures soaring to record highs in Thailand and a punishing heat wave in India that killed at least 13 people from heatstroke last weekend.
Average global temperatures could reach record highs in 2023 or 2024, climatologists have warned. “Climate impacts are here,” Areeba Hamid, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, said on Friday as climate change campaigners marched down the street outside parliament on earth day some dressed in green costumes and green paint.
Hamid said that visiting her hometown of Delhi now was like “sticking your head in an oven” and that the heat wave in London in 2022 was like a “dystopian movie we can’t afford that anymore.”
Activists led by Extinction Rebellion have gathered in London to launch a four-day event dubbed “The Big One” to coincide with Earth Day. About 30,000 people have signed up for family-friendly rallies and marches, marking a shift in strategy for a group known for its destructive tactics, including blocking roads, throwing paint and smashing windows.
Upcoming Earth Day
Globally, there has been a flurry of activity in the run-up to Earth Day, with events planned in Rome and Boston and major clean-up campaigns at Dal Lake in Srinagar, India, and hurricane-hit Cape Coral, Florida.
In Peru, shamans made sacrifices to “Pachamama” or Mother Earth on Fridays. Holding yellow flowers and rattles in their hands, the shamans walked around the papier-mâché ball and performed a purification ritual.
Ancestral rituals whose origins lie in the indigenous cultures of Peru are done to thank the Earth and build awareness of the planet, said Walter Alarcon, president of the International Organization of Healing Shamans of Peru.
Earlier this week, US President Joe Biden pledged to increase funding to help developing countries fight climate change on earth day and curb deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest at a meeting with world leaders.
Governments have fallen far short of commitments in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit climate warming by shifting fossil fuels, amid crises including COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, food shortages and strained relations between China and the US, the top two countries. greenhouse gas emitters.
A report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the planet is on track to warm by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels a key threshold for even more damaging impacts between 2030 and 2035. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a viable and sustainable future for all,” the IPCC said. “Choices and actions taken in this decade will have repercussions now and for thousands of years.”
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