Prince Charles urges world leaders to scale up fight against climate change

The Prince of Wales has urged world leaders that the strategy to address climate change “must be urgently scaled up, and scaled up now”.

In the foreword for a new Ladybird book that he has co-authored on the subject, he said that long-term weather patterns were the greatest threat to the planet.

The Penguin-produced book entitled Climate Change will be published next week.

 In the foreword the prince wrote: “I hope this modest attempt to alert a global public to the ‘wolf at the door’ will make some small contribution towards encouraging requisite action; action that must be urgently scaled up, and scaled up now.”

It was written with Tony Juniper, a fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and former executive director at Friends of the Earth, and Emily Shuckburgh, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey.

It is the first in a new series aimed at adults and is a basic guide on the topic in the style of the iconic children’s Ladybird series that were popular in the Sixties and Seventies. The cover of Climate Change shows the East Sussex town of Uckfield, UK, replicating a photograph from the floods in October 2000.

At the COP21 climate change summit in Paris in November 2015, the prince urged world heavyweights to act, telling them in a speech: “On an increasingly crowded planet, humanity faces many threats, but none is greater than climate change. It magnifies every hazard and tension of our existence.”

This story was written by Liz Gyekye, editor of Bioenergy Insight and Biofuels International.