Renowned broadcaster and natural historian, sir David Attenborough, has warned that the coronavirus pandemic must not take focus away from the world’s climate-change problems.
Awareness around climate change and other global concerns have effectively taken a back seat to the spread of the virus, which has forced many countries into national lockdown.
“The trouble is that right now the climate issue is also seen as being rather in the distant future because we’ve got the virus to think about,” Attenborough said on the So Hot Right Now podcast.
“And so what are the papers full of? The virus. Quite right, that’s what I want to know about, too.
“But we have to make sure that this issue, which was coming to the boil with the next COP meeting in Glasgow, has suddenly been swept off the front pages. And we’ve got to get it back there.”
“The danger of the Arctic and the Antarctic warming is becoming greater day by day.
“What the result of coronavirus is going to be I don’t know. But I’m beginning to get a feeling that for the first time the nations of the world are beginning to see that survival depends on co-operation.
“If that happens, that’s going to be a first in human history.”
Attenborough, meanwhile, has praised teenaged climate activist Greta Thunberg. The 17-year-old Thunberg has copped plenty of criticism for several year. Attenborough, though, is not among her critics.
“I think she’s very remarkable. And what is more she is, with all that power, she is nonetheless extremely modest,” he added.
“She is extremely well informed. And in fact if you aren’t particularly well informed about the natural world, and the minute you find that you can’t get to your work to do what you want to do, or what you need to do to earn a living, because somebody has stopped you because they are talking about an issue you don’t know about, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there will be some people as a consequence of that who will act in an outraged way.”
United Nationas climate negotiator Christiana Figueres will also be interviewed on the So Hot Right Now podcast.