Activists gather for Earth Day, urge action to avoid ‘dystopian’ future

Before Earth Day, climate change activists gathered outside Britain’s parliament building to call for global warming action, as volunteers worldwide prepared to plant trees and clean up.

Earth Day this year, officially on Saturday, follows weeks of extreme weather, including record high temperatures in Thailand and a brutal heatwave in India, where at least 13 people died of heatstroke at a ceremony last weekend.

Climate scientists predict 2023 or 2024 record world temperatures.

“Climate impacts are here,” Greenpeace UK co-executive director Areeba Hamid said Friday as climate change protestors marched outside parliament in green costumes and paint.

Hamid said visiting her hometown of Delhi is like “putting your head in the oven” and that London’s 2022 heatwave was like “a dystopian film”.

“We can’t afford that anymore.”

The Extinction Rebellion group’s four-day “The Big One” began in London on Earth Day.
30,000 people have registered up for family-friendly protests and marches, a change in approach for a group renowned for blocking roads, flinging paint, and smashing windows.

Events in Rome and Boston and large clean-up initiatives at Lake Dal in Srinagar, India, and Cape Coral, Florida, are scheduled for Earth Day.

Shamans in Peru offered “Pachamama” (Mother Earth) on Friday. Shamans cleansed a papier-mache globe while carrying yellow flowers and rattles.

Walter Alarcon, head of the Healing Shamans of Peru International Organization, said the ancestral rites, which originated in Peruvian Indigenous traditions, honor the Earth and raise awareness of the earth.

In a summit with world leaders earlier this week, U.S. President Joe Biden committed to increase financing to help developing countries fight climate change and deforest Brazil’s Amazon jungle.

Amid COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, food shortages, and strained relations between China and the U.S., the top two greenhouse gas polluters, governments have fallen well short of the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goals to curb climate heating by transitioning off fossil fuels.

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the earth will rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial periods between 2030 and 2035, a vital threshold for much more catastrophic repercussions.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the IPCC warned. “This decade’s decisions and actions will last for millennia.”