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Mr. Pat Cox is a former President of the European Parliament, of the European Liberal Democrat and Reformist group and of the Former Members’ Association of the Parliament. Currently, he is President of the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Oxford Word of the Year 2019 is climate emergency. Climate emergency is defined as ‘a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.’ The talk will consider what the scientists predicted and what the evidence shows from an increasingly stressed Mother Nature. It will examine corroborating evidence from the insurance industry. The frequency and intensity of damaging weather events has grown at an accelerating rate. The risk of breaching irreversible tipping points is rising as greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures rise. What is needed globally by way of response is stewardship and not dominion over nature combined with the scale and speed of policy responses. It may well be an emergency but to date it seems to lack an accompanying sense of urgency.We will consider why that is so.