In an unprecedented step toward a comprehensive climate change response among G7 countries, British Parliament voted to declare a "climate emergency" in the United Kingdom earlier this month. The motion came from the main opposition Labour Party, which has championed environmentally ambitious policies.
"We have no time to waste. We are living in a climate crisis that will spiral dangerously out of control unless we take rapid and dramatic action now," Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, told Parliament, according to Reuters.
Because it is a non-binding motion, however, while the government has to respond to the declaration, it isn't committed to any specific climate change policies. The vote is largely symbolic, according to Baroness Bryony Worthington, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund Europe and a lead author on the U.K.'s Climate Change Act (legislation from 2008 that established climate goals for the U.K.). It's not equivalent to other emergency declarations the government has issued in the past in response to issues such as natural disasters or terrorism, which led to specific policy responses.
Still, the vote "indicates that there is a majority of voices in the House of Commons who support more ambitious action to address the risk of global climate change," Worthington says.
Mik Aidt, a journalist at the Centre for Climate Safety, says that the new declaration is different from environmental agreements that preceded it. He runs two environmental websites, one of which urges governments to declare climate emergencies. The Paris Agreement, Aidt argues, "sent the signal that we still have plenty of time to get it all sorted." In contrast, he says, the emergency declaration "justifies that new and faster measures are taken, and it justifies a lot of 'deeper' actions in terms of how we structure our lives, how and who we employ to specific leadership roles, and whether they are on board with the new emergency situation."
[To read more of this article, please click here.]
Comments (0)