Less talk, more action: what the world expects from the Climate Summit
The Glasgow Climate Summit, COP26, is starting and until the 12th experts, politicians and activists will compete to explain who is the most aware and responsible in the fight against global warming. There will again be promises, which will be labelled as insufficient and which, as has happened so far, will probably not be fulfilled. Parole, parole, as the song goes.
However, this COP26 comes at a different time. To begin with, with a year's delay, since it should have been celebrated in 2020 and, understandably, the pandemic advised to postpone it for a year. This fact alone is significant. After the pandemic everything has changed. The world has changed. For the moment, not so much physically or structurally - this is slower - but mentally. Now we know that the unthinkable can happen. That we can spend more than a year standing still, waiting, practically without moving from our place, without relating to anyone except those closest to us, frightened, collapsed by a small virus that attacks the weakest and uses us all as transmitters.
Everything that has happened was difficult to believe and to imagine two years ago, but we have known for some time now that scientists were warning that it was a real possibility, and we have also seen that it is only thanks to scientists - not to politicians, who have generally failed miserably in terms of management and international solidarity - that we are getting out of this situation.
Therefore, the voices that we should be listening to most attentively and respectfully these days in Glasgow should be those of scientists and people affected by the obvious and fully demonstrated effects - even the big American oil companies have finally admitted it - of global warming on populations and territories. What is happening now in some islands of the Pacific Ocean is like the Wuhan of the pandemic. It will come to us sooner or later. And, according to the latest studies, possibly sooner than we think. It is important to analyse well what is being said, to see the contrast of opinions that is debated from the rigor and to understand that, as it happened with the pandemic, we must take into account the social and economic needs of the different countries. Possibly we will also begin to talk about how to alleviate the disaster, because more and more voices are warning that it is practically certain that we are no longer in time to stop the warming of three more degrees celsius of temperature by the end of the century.
It would be good if, in general, we did not treat this COP26 as just another summit. Faced with the words and the often empty promises of politicians, what the world, and especially the young people of this world, are waiting for is action. Clear and direct actions and money to carry them out.