Yesterday was World Environment Day, established by the UN General Assembly in 1972 following the Stockholm Conference on the environment. It marks 50 years since the United Nations Environment Programme was created ‘to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations’. Today, the survival of the planet is under the greatest threat from global warming and climate change caused mainly from the extraction and use of fossil fuels. The phasing out of this source of energy and replacing it with renewable sources therefore needs to be accelerated to keep the average global temperature rise to below 1.5°C. At the moment, there is a serious risk of exceeding this threshold within the next ten years or so.
