After the alarming “red code for humanity” report by the U.N. climate panel was released on Monday, activist Greta Thunberg said that has decided to attend this year’s global climate conference at Glasgow in Scotland.
Thunberg had earlier said she would skip the crucial U.N. global conference scheduled for November as she was concerned that the skewed rollout of COVID-19 vaccines across the world would prevent some countries from attending the meeting safely.
But Britain’s offer in June to vaccinate delegates assuages some of that concern, she said.
"I've said before that I wasn't going to go if it wasn't fair,” Thunberg said in an interview with Reuters. “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."
The 18-year-old Swedish activist, who has given a massive worldwide push to the movement for action against climate, said the U.N. report should be “a wake-up call, in every possible way”.
"When these extreme weather events are happening, many say, what will it take for people in power to start acting? What are they waiting for?” “And it will take many things, but especially, it will take massive pressure from the public and massive pressure from the media," Reuters cited Thunberg as saying.
The world's leading climate scientists on Monday,who authored the report, have warned that some of the climate changes already set in motion would be "irreversible."
The U.N. climate panel warns that limiting global warming to close to 1.5 degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels "will be beyond reach" in the next two decades without immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres described the report as "a code red for humanity."
"The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk," Guterres said.
