Prince Charles: World is not acting quickly enough over climate change

Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 30 Sep 08;

Prince Charles has warned that the world is not reacting quickly enough to combat climate change.

He said the clock of climate change was ticking faster towards midnight."We are simply not reacting quickly enough and we cannot be anything less than courageous and revolutionary in our approach to tackling climate change.

"If we are not, the result will be catastrophic for all of us, but with the poorest in our world hit the hardest," he said in an interview in Weather, the magazine of the Royal Meteorological Society of which he is the patron.

"There are some difficult questions that we must ask ourselves. Do we really understand the dynamics of a world in which energy and food security will become real issues for everyone?

"Can we say, hand on heart, that we are really doing enough to improve energy efficiency?

"Can we possibly allow 20 years of business-as-usual before coal power generation becomes clean, especially with the rapid increase in the number of coal power plants being built in China alone?

"Are we truly investing enough in renewable energy technologies? How can we build a really effective dialogue with China and India, and indeed the United States, which recognizes the real security implications of climate change?

"How do we maximise the role of the private sector in achieving a low carbon economy"?

The Prince said the most urgent, but neglected, cause of climate change was the appalling loss of the world's tropical rainforests where emissions through burning were comparable to those generated by the production of electricity and heat.

The world had to accept that the forests were a giant global public utility which helped clean the atmosphere of pollutants, fed it with moisture and acted as a natural thermostat in helping regulate the climate.

"Everyone accepts the necessity of paying for water, gas or electricity - so now we must start to pay for the ecosystem services these great forests provide to us. It is by no means easy to sort out exactly how this can be done, but it is absolutely essential that we do it," he said.

The Prince has established his own Rainforest Project supported by 12 major companies, NGOs as well as international institutions and organisations, such as the World Bank, to campaign for the preservation of the rainforests.

"My objective is to create the largest ever public-private-NGO partnership - and if by working together we can make forests more alive than dead and stop their global destruction, then perhaps we can use this same approach to tackle the other global climate challenges," he said.

The Prince also spoke of the aftermath of extreme weather events that he had witnessed for himself including Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans and the Boscastle flood in Cornwall four years ago.

"Like many people Hurricane Katrina will stay in my mind for a long time. I saw the aftermath myself when I visited the area shortly after it had happened and the sheer scale of the devastation and the immense human suffering it caused were almost unimaginable," he said.

"And then in this country, I will never forget the flood at Boscastle in Cornwall four years ago. It was such a freak event. A normal summer's day turned into a disaster. How no-one was killed, I will never know."

Prince Charles praised the work of the IPCC and said it had helped to galvanize public opinion. He singled out former US Vice President Al Gore and said in his opinion he had made the single most important contribution to the climate debate with his film An Inconvenient Truth.