This is not yet how the world steps up the fight against climate change. The president of the Portuguese Society of Ecology (SPECO), Maria Amélia Martins-Loução, is convinced that the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP27), which takes place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, does not see enough action for so much discussion.
The biologist and former professor at the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon admits that “there are always great hopes and a great desire” to present measures, but when each government official returns to his country “the realities are different and there ends up being a dilution of problems”.
“It’s extremely difficult to deal with that and take a global stance, and without one, you’re not going anywhere,” he laments. Maria Amélia Martins-Loução even identifies a chronic problem in this type of conference: the lack of a global vision.
“There is great difficulty in showing that the polluting countries end up having a greater effect on the less polluting countries, which end up suffering the consequences of all these actions,” explains the former professor, recalling that what is done to the planet forms “a circle and “everything that is done in a certain place ends up being felt in places much further away”.
Thus, the “lack of awareness” that “what is done in Africa can affect Portugal, and vice versa” ends up “resulting in small things and not big things, as might be expected”.
One of the problems that has generated the most concern is global warming, whose fight has gone through the adoption of objectives, such as the one defined in the Paris Agreement, of keeping the increase below 1.5 ºC in relation to pre-industrial levels . until the end of the 21st century. The president of SPECO does not believe that this is possible and “the models already indicate it”.
“The less it increases, the better for us, but we have to be aware that what we have been doing cannot prevent these increases,” he points out.
Given these data, it is possible to affirm that “humanity has not been able to cope with or respect the biosphere.” Maria Amélia Martins-Loução warns that “only when resources start to run out, as we have already seen with the grain issue and the overwhelming increase due to the war, do we begin to realize that everything is interconnected and we cannot keep whistling the side”.
Political decision-makers, academics and non-governmental organizations meet, until the 18th, in Sharm el-Sheikh, at COP27, with the aim of stopping global warming of the planet, limiting it to two degrees Celsius, among other goals.
Source: TSF
