Speech of Christina Nicolaou, Head of the Environment Bureau of the C.C. of AKEL, at the meeting on World Environment Day
AKEL C.C. Press Office, 6TH June 2016, Nicosia
On behalf of the Environment Bureau of the C.C. of AKEL, we welcome you to our event today dedicated to World Environment Day.
With great joy, I welcome our dear friend Costas Hatzipanayiotou, Director of the Environment Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development and Environment, who responds to our every call and I thank him for accepting our invitation to be with us today.
We also thank the representatives of environmental organizations and movements for their presence, which through their daily activities are raising people’s awareness of environmental issues. Today’s awards are a token of AKEL’s appreciation for their determined and consistent activity because the environment is now more relevant and important than ever before, and that’s precisely how we should all perceive them.
3,852 natural disasters have killed more than 780,000 people over the last 10 years, affecting two billion others and costing at least $ 960 billion. Climate change is now a fact and no one can deny or put it in the back of his/her mind.
We now know that if we continue the current path of permitting emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything in the world.
Large cities are most likely to be covered in water, ancient civilizations will be swallowed by the seas and there is a very high likelihood of our children spending much of their life trying to escape and recover from the vicious cycle of storms and extreme droughts. Hence we don’t have to do anything to make this future a reality. All you have to do is nothing, just keep doing what we are doing now, telling ourselves that unfortunately we are too busy to deal with it.
But for the Left that is not an option. The Left’s sensitivities to ecological and environmental issues dates years back. Ecological consciousness and the Left are concepts that are interlinked and identical. They complement each other. There are ways to prevent and restore this bleak future, through proposals which AKEL has long ago submitted. These concrete proposals include changing the functioning of the economy and consumption, implementing policies that will improve and eradicate the gap between the rich and poor, as well as restoring social equality and democracy.
The exhibition ‘A truth that bothers’, which has been prepared by the Environment Bureau of the C.C. of AKEL, doesn’t aim to cultivate despair, but to illustrate the seriousness of the situation.
In the various sections of the exhibition, which you will be able to subsequently see, some of the most serious environmental problems facing humanity today are presented.
It is now clear that we face a deepening global climate crisis that demands from us all to act quickly and wisely.
