• social work

Following the initiative of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, about 1.7 million young people across 128 countries and over 2200 cities marched on Friday, 15 March, for the future of our planet. Youth across the globe are asking adults to act as such: grown-ups. They are demanding decision-makers take their responsibilities and show the political will that climate action is crucially missing. To respond to the climate crisis, ambitious policies must be enforced and ambitious actions must be taken. Not because it is a nice thing to do, but because it is an absolute necessity.

In September last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the United Nations (UN) consortium of climate scientists—released its special report on a warming of 1.5°C. The conclusions are irrevocable. First, above this threshold, we can expect catastrophic consequences, such as more extreme weather events (eg, heat waves, heavy rains and hurricanes), food and energy shortage, the spreading of diseases and parasites, wildlife extinction and ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification leading to coral bleaching and the vanishing of coastal zones due to sea-level rise threatening the life of hundreds of millions of people. Second, the measures required to limit a warming of …